Towards an integrated multimodal transportation dashboard

Many sophisticated Information Systems (IS) focusing on management and supervision problems in the transportation arena exist in the contemporary world. Road traffic management systems, rail traffic management systems and many more are here to face everyday challenges. However, in spite of a huge progress in this area, systems that combine multiple transport modes for management purposes are a very few. This article proposes a solution for the monitoring of the operational state of multimodal transportation systems in a single dashboard. The experimental solution is applied to the transport network of the city of Porto, Portugal, as a case study. The problem includes such major components as (1) input information and its sources, (2) model (metrics, calculation algorithms) and (3) visualization metaphors. A proposed solution is a dashboard that provides a comprehensive view on the operational state, or Level of Service (LOS), of transportation systems of different types. Such a system is expected to become an essential tool for transport system monitoring and management, supplying the necessary information for strategic and emergency planning to the authorities and other decision makers in the sector.