SUNSET – Sustainable Social Network Services for Transport

The yearly growth of personal mobility results in increasing safety, economic and environmental concerns. SUNSET alleviates these concerns by taking a new approach to urban mobility management using the latest ICT technologies. It is about cooperation by information sharing and provision of positive incentives between travellers, road authorities and other parties. The information is targeted on individual travel behaviour, and thus allows road authorities to fine-tune their transport policies and individuals to meet their personal objectives.

SUNSET uses four mechanisms:

1. Web 2.0 technology to create communities that are involved in mobility.
2. ICT technology to collect individual travel patterns and to distribute information.
3. Positive incentives to encourage and help travellers to adopt a more sustainable mobility behaviour. Incentives may stem from all parties involved and may contain information about the current and future status of the transport infrastructure and about travel alternatives. Also feedback information of individual travel behaviour or financial incentives will be involved.
4. Living labs to evaluate the SUNSET system under well-monitored conditions.

The SUNSET consortium contains partners from the complete value chain: providers of location-based services,mobile operators, local authorities, green mobility solutions and well-known research centres. The consortium will design, build, implement, test and evaluate the application. This includes research on the effects of various incentives, on mobility-pattern recognition techniques by mobile applications, on community-building mechanisms in newly developed portals, and on the roles and influences of all parties involved.