Flexiant selected to play essential role in FP7 MOVESMART Project

Flexiant has been selected as part of the multi-national FP7 MOVESMART project to provide the cloud infrastructure and orchestration platform for the research consortium.

MOVESMART aims to provide route mapping and flexible personal mobility services using a set of crowd-sourcing tools for collecting real-time information by multimodal travellers. At the core of MOVESMART is a hierarchical urban-traffic infrastructure that is hosted and maintained by cloud architecture. The project will enhance transport integration by working with electric car manufacturers, service providers and public authorities to create workable examples of the technology in two major cities with different profiles in terms of size and complexity of their transport network. Using real-time personalized mobility services based on crowd-sourced information from travellers, MOVESMART will gather anonymous data using either mobile data or via simple portable devices.

Craig Sheridan, Head of Research Projects at Flexiant said, “The cloud perfectly exists for projects like MOVESMART. With consortium members across Europe collaborating on a vast amount data, it allows us to deliver the on-demand resource necessary to scale to meet our needs. But using the cloud requires sophisticated management which is why Flexiant was selected.”

Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator will serve as the cloud management platform to ensure that the consortium members have the infrastructure required, when required. The cloud orchestration platform enables scalable, on-demand, fully automated provisioning of cloud services.

Sheridan continued, “MOVESMART will utilize Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator to manage the cloud infrastructure and data captured and communicated to and from mobile devices. This will enable traditional cloud computing resources such as networking and storage to conveniently requisition, on demand, mobile computing resources as part of a mobile ecosystem while handling increasing levels of data.”

Flexiant will also make available its extensive APIs as well as the Flexiant Query Language (FQL) for resources to be obtained programmatically. The mobile data will be stored and managed in the Flexiant cloud environment as opposed to individual mobile devices allowing on-demand access.
MOVESMART combines partners from across the EU including technology, research and educational institutions from Spain, Greece, Germany, the United Kingdom and Croatia. The project will create advances in cloud technology to address the problem of time-dependent route planning profiles in large-scale urban traffic networks.

Dionisis Kehagias, MOVESMART Technical Coordinator and Instructor at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, said, “The project’s goal is to respond in real-time to on-demand queries for efficient multi-modal route planning, both time-dependent and sensitive to aperiodic incidents, such as car accidents or sudden weather conditions, and forecasts provided by a Traffic Prediction Module, so that robustness and recoverability of the proposed route plans against reported but unforeseen disruptions is guaranteed.”

MOVESMART envisions the server-based creation and maintenance of time-dependent urban-traffic metadata as well as live-traffic logging, hosted in an urban traffic knowledge base (UTKB). A crucial advantage of the MOVESMART infrastructure is the design and implementation of novel time-dependent renewable mobility services that will incorporate eco-friendly modes of transport, most notably that of electric vehicles. A set of innovative cloud-based mobility services will be delivered, such as renewable mobility on demand, vehicle sharing and integrated personal mobility, on which new business models will be deployed involving service providers, electric car manufacturers and public authorities.