Invitation to the Ruter’s Supplier Conference: ITxPT Specifications Implementation Required in the Tender

Ruter has traditionally focused on “public transport” but is now expanding the horizon towards “sustainable freedom of movement”. This implies that Ruter will offer flexible transport-solutions that includes the whole journey “door-to-door”, that are safe, reliable, available and easy to use. The offering will include traditional scheduled public transport in combination with non-scheduled, shared or individual transport-solutions.Ruter wishes to present their ambitions in this area for the coming years and demonstrate Ruters Digital Platform – mainly from a “service” perspective, but also touching on architecture and technical implementation.

The objective of the conference is to establish dialogue with technology-suppliers, services-providers, gründer- and startups with innovative products, solutions or ideas. The goal is to implement one or more innovative procurement processes.

Ruter’s IT portfolio is composed of several independent and proprietary solutions mainly supporting a specific function or customer channel. The systems are monolithic and depend heavily on distributed hardware and distributed processing capabilities. Due to this, the solutions are costly to operate and maintain – and they are not suited as platforms for developing the dynamic and integrated services that will be required in the future.  In addition – some solutions will reach “end-of-life” this decade and the goal is to avoid having to re-invest in similar solutions. As a consequence, Ruter defined in 2016 the architecture of a completely new digital platform that is cloud-based, datacentric, event-driven and is designed for processing huge amounts of data in real-time. It is based on technologies developed by large international corporations for their own use, but later made available as Open Source.  The development of the platform itself as well as the services takes place in multifunctional teams using principles from Design Sprint, Lean, Agile, DevOps and CI/CD.  The platform is already in production hosting some new services.

Ruter is a member of ITxPT and is strongly supporting the development of standardised solutions as it has some significant advantages above proprietary ones. Through standards, the market opens, which contributes to fostering innovations, shortening time-to-market for new services and reducing cost-of-ownership. During the next few years, several large operator contracts will be renewed and a large number of new vehicles (buses, trams and ferries) will be replaced. Ruter specifies implementation of the ITxPT Specifications as mandatory. The operators are fully responsible also for the IT-equipment on-board the vehicles. The new contracts specify several data streams that the operator is responsible for producing by means of the on-board equipment, various sensors and registers. The data shall be transmitted in real-time to Ruters Digital Platform where the data will be processed, combined with other data streams, stored and published for consummation in various channels. Data streams include vehicle position, passenger load and movements (embark/disembark) and various vehicle-related data (e.g. speed, friction, fuel consumption). Data will be made available over defined API´s according to Ruters policy for open data.

More and more people are already using several digital services. In fact – more that 95 % of all passengers on board Ruter’s vehicles have a smart phone. The expectation and demand for personalised services is constantly increasing. Access to data from vehicles, road-authorities, weather forecasts and similar – in addition to data from de travellers, will make possible the development of services that are personal, contextual and in real-time.

PREPARATIONS AND REGISTRATION 

Ruter wants to explore models for joint innovation and discuss how to better collaborate and request feedback on what you want to address in the conference. In particular, Ruter is interested in concrete proposals for activities and areas for collaboration. Please send your input by e-mail by October 10th, 2018 to anbud@ruter.no. Ruter’s has allocated 10 minutes per participating company and will compile the input into a presentation that may form the basis for discussions.

Each company may register 2 participants in the conference and registration is required. Companies sending feedback/questions/input will be prioritised.

All information exchanged, presented or discussed in the conference will be made publicly available through https://ruter.no/kollektivanbud/moter/.

For registrations, please complete the registration form by October 10th, 2018. For more details, please click here.

If you have questions – please send them to anbud@ruter.no

Date & time:   16. October 2018 – kl. 09:00 – 13:00
Venue:            Oslo Kongressenter/Auditoriet, Folkets Hus, Youngsgate 21, 0181 Oslo