The main goal of the DORA project was to design and establish a seamless and integrated information system that helps passengers to optimize travel time of an entire journey – Door-to-Door – involving air travel. The entire journey includes traveling from an origin of the trip, e.g. home, to airplane at departing airport, including assistance for the travelers while moving through airport building, as well as from the plain and through the arrival airport to the final destination of the journey.
To ensure it, the DORA integrated information system, which was created within the project together with necessary software platforms and end user applications, was aiming at the reduction of overall time needed for a typical European air travel including the necessary time needed for transport to and from the airports. The integrated solution is providing a single point of visualization – a smart phone APP – of the overall trip eliminating the need for combining information (public transport schedules, ticket, maps, etc.) that has to be manually collected by travelers from different and heterogeneous sources of relevant information.
Accordingly, the DORA system provided mobile, seamless, and time optimized route recommendations for travels to the airport and time optimized routing within the airports, leading the passengers through terminals to the right security and departure gates. To enable it, DORA integrated all necessary real time information on disruptions in the land transport environments and on incidents in the airport terminals to provide the fastest route alternatives, ensuring the accessibility of airport and airplane at any time in accordance with individual passengers’ needs. To support the route optimization, the DORA project has investigated and designed technologies for recognition of waiting queues and indoor location services in airports, which were integrated into the entire DORA system. The DORA system has been designed in a generic way and provides software development templates and open Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), to ensure that it can be widely adopted independently on passengers and airports locations.
During the project life time, the DORA system has been implemented and tested in realistic environments involving the cities of Berlin and Palma de Mallorca as well as the corresponding airports with involvement of real end users – air travelers – in the DORA pilot. Furthermore, the project analyzed usability of the provided solution from the perspective of the end users and other relevant stakeholders, by considering potential benefits for various stakeholder groups and related impacts, performed technical evaluation of the overall solution including performance evaluation of the system, and investigated various aspects of business perspectives for DORA achievements.
The main project results achieved during its life time are summarized below:
• Design, implementation, and integration of all DORA services and applications, needed to build the integrated information system for Door-to-Door journeys involving air travel, completed as planned
• Functional and performance testing of entire DORA system and all its components has been successfully performed
• High satisfaction of end users – air travelers who participated in the DORA pilot and used the DORA services – has been achieved, including significant potential in saving the overall travel time and overall convenience while travelling for the air passengers
• Transferability of the DORA solution has been ensured, so it can be implemented in other cities/regions and airports wide beyond implementations in Berlin and Palma.
