Developing a new generation of urban bus systems

The European Bus System of the Future – known as EBSF (www.ebsf.eu) – is a wide-scale project co-funded by the European Commission under the seventh Framework Programme for research and technological development and has an overall budget of €26 million. Between September 2008 and September 2012, 47 partners – including the five leading European manufacturers – are joining forces to define and develop a new generation of bus systems adapted to European cities.

Coordinated by the International Association of Public Transport (UITP), the EBSF aims at developing a new generation of urban bus systems that can be adapted to the individual specifications of European cities. It is the first co-funded project by the European Commission dedicated to urban buses and therefore acts as a driver to increase the attractiveness and raise the image of bus systems in urban and suburban areas by means of developing new technologies on vehicles and infrastructures in combination with operational best practices.

The EBSF Vision

The EBSF Vision is the first strategic document which sets out the six missions for the whole EBSF project: responding to the needs of the passengers, the cities, the society and the environment, as well as promoting political support and relevant legislation, securing global leadership and encouraging the creation of a frame dedicated to the research for urban bus systems.

On a wider level, the UITP strategy known as ‘Public transport: the smart green solution’ aims at doubling the worldwide market share of public transport by 2025, which has become known by its abbreviation, PTx2. This strategy is based upon the observation that a common effort is needed to change current mobility patterns in order to avoid the negative impact of an unmanaged urban and mobility sprawl. The public transport sector has this capacity to provide urban areas with sustainable forward-looking mobility. The EBSF Vision reflects the PTx2 strategy into the urban bus systems in Europe.

PTx2 relies on a strong commitment of all mobility actors. A massive shift towards efficient public transport networks will have a positive economic, social and environmental impact on cities. The key missions of the EBSF Vision are in-line with the five priority axes fixed by the UITP to help the public transport sector reach the objective of PTx2. They are related to the creation of a new business culture shifting from a ‘production-led’ approach to a ‘fully fledged service’ one, the development of integrated urban policies, the introduction of sustainable investment schemes as well as financing projects, the implementation of measures (namely car restraint ones) and a focus on delivering lifestyle services so that public transport can become the mode of choice for citizens.

Citizens currently have many options when choosing a mode of transport. So in order to make public transport the favourite travel choice, transport companies really need to prioritise customer satisfaction and marketing and this has been concretely applied in the first year of the EBSF through a huge collection of all the stakeholders’ needs.

The EBSF System Definition: the results of the first project year

The EBSF doesn’t look at the vehicle in isolation but as one of the elements integrated in the whole bus system together with infrastructure and operations; such logic is called ‘the system approach’. This system approach also reflects the functional integration of the main bus system stakeholders: the organising authorities and the municipalities; the operators and the bus manufacturing industry.

Figure 1 on page 46 describes the logic of the EBSF project. It is composed by three main phases: the System Definition, the Technology Developments and the Use Cases.

During the first phase of the project, the EBSF System Definition, the requirements of the whole system and the sub-systems (vehicle, infrastructure and operations) have been identified to design the architecture of the whole system. Such activities were executed in the frame of the first Sub-Project mainly performed in the first year of the project. The EBSF partners defined the needs of the Public Transport stakeholders, and transformed them into system and sub-system requirements, in order to define a common system applicable to the European bus system of the future. The reference architecture has been issued from the system requirement’s elicitation.

This first stage in the EBSF acts as the baseline of the second phase: the Technology Developments of the key concepts and elements of the global EBSF system for the vehicles and infrastructures, and the relative operational concept and practices. The sub-system design, the development of the equipment, of the prototypes, and the bus demonstrators’ integration, will be covered by Sub-Projects ‘2’ and ‘3’. These activities, which started in the first year of EBSF, will be mainly executed in the second and third years of project. In the last phase of the project, the solutions developed will be tested by seven Use Cases (Bremerhaven, Budapest, Brunoy, Gothenburg, Madrid, Rome and Rouen) in real operational scenarios in order to evaluate the added values of the new solutions vis-à-vis the existing status. Performed in Sub-Project ‘4’, these activities will mainly happen during the final half of the last year of the project.

Strategic activities, including the dissemination of the results, the initial standardisation process of the developed solutions, the recommendations for system implementation and the priorities for future research on urban bus systems, complement all the phases of EBSF in the view of increasing its visibility and acceptance in the Public Transport domain.

The main objective of the first year of the EBSF project was to define the whole EBSF system. This work has produced a set of documents which are large in number and big in dimension, as they have to detail the complex aspects of the bus system, combination of vehicle, infrastructure and operation. A Compendium1 of these activities has been produced with the aim of presenting the main results of this work in an easier way and to a large Public Transport audience. It includes the main outcomes and results of all the activities, analysis, review, meetings, brainstorming, task forces sessions, expert consultations, performed by more than 200 people belonging to the 47 partners of the project. All the concepts included in this Compendium are supported by detailed analysis: the specific EBSF source documents are always indicated in the presentation of these results.

The EBSF: the ‘trunk’ for future researches on urban bus systems

The EBSF is dedicated to the definition of the European Bus System of the Future. The EBSF integrated approach (focused on the synergies between infrastructures, operations, vehicles) contributes to the design and development of an innovative, high-quality ‘bus systems’.

The analysis performed on system level to highlight the main innovative key concepts gives a good overview of the potential for further Research and Development. For this reason, it is helpful to represent the logic of the EBSF development as a ‘tree-shaped’ design:

• In the initial phase of the project, the system’s ‘roots’ were set by drawing up and analysing the needs and expectations of stakeholders (user needs collection) and by defining the ‘ideal system’ (the EBSF Vision)
• The ‘trunk’ of the global system is composed by the EBSF system definition, made of its system requirements and the system architecture. Such trunk embraces the main basic functionalities of the EBSF system
• From the trunk grow ‘branches’: the different EBSF aspects that can be further analysed, developed or to generate Use Cases and then give birth to other branches. Branches are for example the sub-systems requirements (vehicle, infrastructure and operations) that can generate new branches representing technical specifications, technology development, trade-off analysis and trials.

‘Modularity’ can be considered as an example of the application of this tree concept. From the analysis of the stakeholders’ needs (roots), one of the specific basic functions of the EBSF definition has been identified as relative to the modularity of the system components (trunk). Thus, requirements about modularity have been defined at EBSF system and then at sub-system level (branches).

The EBSF tree concept

On this basis, the technical development activities of the project is going to deal with modularity (in the WP2.5), in particular split in two branches, one about ‘external modularity’, as capability to add some modules to increase the vehicle volume and the other about ‘internal modularity’; further, the Rome Use Case will test the internal modular solutions implemented in the relative Irisbus prototype. Further studies, developments and tests can be performed in the future growing as new branches.

Such tree concept is the key to understanding the global system approach of EBSF to the research on urban bus systems. On this regard, two aspects can be considered.

The main goal of the first year of the project has been the definition of the whole EBSF System in order to describe its full potentials. Considering the complexity of the system, it is impossible, in the frame of a single project, to design in detail all the elements that compose the whole EBSF.

Therefore, in the following project activities, a selection of key technologies and solutions (like the modularity) are subject to detailed specifications (deriving from specific and deep trade-offs and analysis), development of prototypes and will be further tested in real operational environments: they represent the bricks for the Sub-Project ‘2’ and ‘3’ work.

For the aspects which are developed in the project, EBSF acts as the platform where the consistency of specific solutions designed will be assessed in the future, when put in the global system.

In the research scenario, EBSF represents the backbone from which European bus research activities can grow. Based on the defined requirements, in concordance with the global system design and the common specifications settled in EBSF, new research can grow like branches, developing specific areas or aspects of the whole system, and contributing to detail the total EBSF system.

Last but not least, it must be underlined that the EBSF ‘tree’ with its system requirement and architecture platform, will appear as the reference to test innovative solutions or to analyse the impact of changes on the requirements or the technical behaviour. For example, it could be used to assess the effect of new enabling technologies (like Galileo) on IT applications and guidance solutions; or it could be the base to analyse new requirements coming from new environmental issues.

Reference

1. The EBSF Compendium 1 is available; should you want a copy, please email: [email protected]

About the authors

Umberto Guida
Umberto Guida has a systems engineer background and has been coordinating a wide range of European research projects in the areas of transport and aerospace for more than 10 years. Since 2008, Umberto has been the Large Scale Project Director at the UITP and Head of the EBSF project. Before joining the UITP, he was Project Manager in Alcatel Alenia Space, one of the main European aerospace industries, and in ESSP, a pan-European satellite operator.

Maeva Zebrowski
Maeva Zebrowski has a background in International Law and European Law. For more than six years she has been managing European projects mainly in ICT and transport areas. Since 2008, Maeva has been a Project Manager for the UITP. Maeva is the Leader of the Sub-Project 4 of the EBSF project; in particular she is responsible for all communication and dissemination activities in the project. Before joining UITP, Maeva worked for EUROCITIES – the network of the big European cities and previously for the International Criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.

Figure 1 A visual-description of the EBSF project