A New Transport System

Existing transport systems have a set of challenges: Roads can be congested, cars are causing emissions, require human attention and decrease road safety (not all of these challenges will be solved with Autonomous Driving). Buses, trams, trains, or undergrounds can also be congested, overcrowded and don’t offer much privacy and comfort.

Can there be a new transport system that resolves these issues? One that works autonomously and of course electric, provides privacy to travelers, and is available on demand? The answer could lie in the third dimension.

I have investigated the competitive landscape in this area and started addressing potential customers and partners for a stealth venture.

ROLE

Strategy Advisor

CLIENT

Stealth Venture

SOLUTIONS

Customer Discovery

Competitive Landscape

Autonomous Shuttle prototype

Company

ohmio is a maker of Autonomous Shuttles. The company is based in Auckland, New Zealand and has been founded in 2017 as an affiliate of HMI Technologies.

 

Background and Challenge

With long experience from developing road side infrastructure, as well as from deploying Navya Shuttles in Christchurch, Sydney, and Melbourne, the ohmio founder decided to build his own Autonomous Shuttle. As a first step, prototypes had to be developed to gain better understanding of most suitable sensors and compute platform, and of software development for perception, path planning, and drive control.

 

Results

In just six months we have built prototypes by equipping and refurbishing golf carts and demonstrated them on public roads in Christchurch city center in September 2017. This brought clarity on the suitability of selected technologies, on complexity of the venture, as well as reaction of the public on the introduction of Autonomous Shuttles. The three shuttles we have built are able to drive on a ‘virtual track’ alone or in a platoon, using Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) and Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) communications.

The Shuttles are continuously sending data to a backend service to

• inform travelers through an app about the current location of the vehicles
• allow an operator monitoring through a real-time dashboard what the vehicles are doing
• enable vehicle developers analyzing collected data and understand driving behavior

Theses backend services are built on AWS using the ElasticSearch, Loggstash, and Kibana (ELK) stack. 

 

My Role / Impact

As Chief Digital Officer I have hired a team of AI experts to work on vehicle driving algorithms. Together with my team I have built the backend services for the vehicle prototypes and personally implemented the analytics dashboard in Kibana. I have also supported the Chief Engineer in strategic decisions regarding sensors, compute platform, and location technologies.

COMPANY

HMI Technologies / ohmio

ROLE

Chief Digital Officer

METHODS & TECHNOLOGIES

Lean Startup

Agile (KANBAN)

Autonomous Shuttles

AWS Cloud

ElasticSearch, Kibana

Mobility as a Service (MaaS) Platform

Company

Siemens Mobility builds high speed, commuter, underground, and light rail trains, rail and road side infrastructure, signaling and traffic management systems, as well as a variety of more digital systems for passenger information and ticketing.

 

Background and Challenge

In a ‘Digitalization’ initiative in 2012 Siemens Mobility’s goal was to integrate rail and road transport with new mobility modes such as car sharing, bike sharing, EV charging, etc. Initially, there was a vague idea to build a digital mobility platform, but customers still had to be discovered and development had to get started.

 

Results

In cooperation with potential customers in Berlin, the UK, and Singapore market requirements were made tangible by boiling down traveler’s pain points to a set of questions:

• From a given location, where is the next Public Transport stop and what are the real-time departure times at that stop?
• What is the current traffic situation on roads if I decide to use the car?
• What other transport options are available around me? Where can I find a shared bike or car, an EV charging post, taxi stand, or parking garage?
• What (combination of) transport mode is best for me to get to my destination, regarding travel time, cost, CO2 emission, and comfort?

Paying for all mobility services through one account was also seen as an important next step, but not straightforward to implement out of political reasons. Once we understood these basic questions and some other constraints we built a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) and deployed it for Berlin.

The Cloud-native mobility platform brings (near real-time) information from dozens of transport operators together and makes it available through a RESTful web service API. Siemens’ customers – public transport operators and other mobility service providers - can then integrate this information easily in their app or web site. The Cloud platform is implemented using Microservices running in Docker and orchestrated through Kubernetes, all of this on AWS. For demonstration purpose we have developed a native app for Android. This was the first project in Siemens Mobility in which Cloud computing and Agile methodologies have been used. The project became a blueprint for many other projects at Siemens.

The MVP was deployed first for Berlin, after 6 months development time, subsequently for Cologne, and later for Switzerland, and Dubai. Siemens has built its ‘SiMobility Connect’ product line and organization around this platform.

 

My Role / Impact

As senior executive and product owner for the solution I initiated development following consulting work with potential customers in the UK and Singapore which helped me understanding market requirements. I managed to get funding and assembled an awesome development teams in Germany and India; and led development and operations of the product for more than 2 years.

A key part of my work has been the creation of the business model as well as business development through building up leadership material and frequent presentations at conferences. When the Minimum Sellable Product (MSP) was in place I handed the product over to a mainstream product manager.

COMPANY

Siemens Mobility

Mobility Service Providers

Transport Operators

ROLE

Senior Product Owner

Solution Executive

METHODS & TECHNOLOGIES

Lean Startup

Agile (SCRUM)

Mobile App

Microservices

AWS Cloud, Jelastic

Docker

DevOps