ECIM project officially ended on 30 June 2016. During the 30 months of the project, 14 partners from five European countries worked collectively and in cooperation with other actors, such as mobility service providers, public authorities and cities, to help ECIM achieve its three main objectives:
Enable cities and business to easily migrate their services to the cloud;
Facilitate new service creation by opening-up cloud-based services to innovators;
Spur cross-border adoption of cloud-based services in Europe and beyond.
All efforts to achieve these objectives dealt exclusively with the subject of mobility, an area of high importance to every city, big and small, in Europe and internationally. Within mobility, special attention was first given to parking due to its impact on traffic, environment and quality of life more generally. But as the project developed, new services were included in ECIM’s portfolio, namely public transport, car and bike sharing, and EV charging stations. Towards the end of its lifecycle ECIM resembled a truly multi-modal solution capable of addressing a number of important mobility needs of a contemporary city.
Final Review
On 13 July 2016 ECIM partners gathered in Brussels for the final project review and passed it with flying colours! The project officer and the reviewers once again noted the excellent quality of the deliverables and great progress in the last period and were very positive in their evaluation of partners’ efforts that made ECIM’s 30-month journey a success. We’d like to say huge “Thank You!” to all partners and stakeholders who have supported the project during this time.
Main Results
The outcome of this joint effort was the delivery of three main technical outputs: ECIM Marketplace, ECIM mobility apps and ECIM Smart Mobility API specifications. In designing the Marketplace partners were guided by their vision of a platform where different mobility related services can be easily published, aggregated and shared. Once the platform was ready, a set of common APIs was promoted through the SmartMobility.io initiative, which aims to standardise the ways in which mobility services (APIs) are made available to developers. Both ECIM common API specifications and the platform were an important step towards the creation and subsequent improvement of the three apps for the pilot cities Brussels, Issy-les-Moulineaux and Barcelona.
ECIM Smart Mobility Marketplace, the key output of WP3, is a flexible, cloud-based solution for public and private sector actors who seek or provide web services to address mobility related needs of their cities. The Marketplace is a unique environment where service providers, data providers and developers come together and engage in co-design and co-creation of Mobility applications for citizens.
SmartMobility.io simplifies integration and interoperability of different mobility related services, such as parking and payment, though Common RESTful APIs. ECIM Common APIs provide a framework for harmonising custom API formats used by different mobility service providers, thus allowing developers to easily connect to the services and create killer apps for cities and citizens.
ECIM mobility apps have been co-designed and tested using Living Lab approach in three European cities: Brussels, Issy-les-Moulineaux and Barcelona, and a proof-of-concept has been run in Birmingham. These multimodal apps combine a range of different mobility services, from parking to payment, to public transport and bike sharing, and the ones in Brussels and Issy-les-Moulineaux include a single-sign-on functionality, which allows users to access and pay for parking services of different providers – BePark, Mobile-for and PayByPhone – using a single user account.
Next Steps
In the final month of the project partners organised a second sustainability workshop to streamline consortium’s views regarding the most suitable business model for ECIM, as well as to find consensus on how to make the first steps toward commercialisation after the final review. At the end of the workshop several partners expressed strong interest in taking ECIM to the next level which includes but is not limited to the creation of a company focused on smart mobility.