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Thessaloniki Mobility Monitoring Center

greece, thessaloniki, saloniki-1766013.jpg
Thessaloniki, Image by wordpress

City: Thessaloniki
Audience: Large City
Topic: Traffic and demand management
Step in the SUMP cycle: Step 10: Manage implementation

More Information:
interregeurope.eu

Activity description

The region occupies the eastern half of the traditional region of Central Greece, including the island of Euboea. It has total population of 547,390 inhabitants. Central Greece is moving towards the adoption of mobility plans.

The MMC (Mobility Monitoring Centre) of Thessaloniki is operated by the Hellenic Institute of Transport of CERTH and collects, analyses and disseminates mobility related data for the city. The MMC of Thessaloniki objectives are to monitor the operation and development of the transport system of the city, integrate data from different sources, support planning and decision making, provide a platform where different actors can share and disseminate data, provide mobility information to the general public and to promote sustainable mobility, and as a result, improve quality of life in the city. In the framework of a number of European, transnational and national projects the transport systems of the city have been (and is being) equipped with ITS infrastructure collecting useful traffic data. These data, integrated with other mobility data, probe data and social content, are being managed in the Big Data infrastructure for processing, analysing and visualizing multi-source data in real time that has been installed in CERTH/HIT premises. Data analytics, advanced visualization and indicators estimation tools have been developed and a transport modelling lab has been set up. In addition, on-line services for interaction with the travellers have been developed and an open data portal providing aggregated traffic data for Thessaloniki is available.

Lessons learnt

The main challenges encountered during the implementation of the MMC were related to lack of ITS systems to support data collection, the reluctance of actors to share data, big data management and the need to secure resources for its continuous update and improvement. The resources for the development of the MMC came from several projects that have been implemented by various actors in the metropolitan area of Thessaloniki. A draft estimation of the financial resources used is 6 million euro.