Back in September, the DG Cities team was buzzing around the CENEX CAM event. Between presenting on panels and showcasing our projects, we certainly kept ourselves busy. We were especially excited to launch Project Endeavour at the event alongside our consortium partners Addison Lee Group, Nominet, Oxbotica and Immense Simulations. 

This week, our partners have been sharing some insights into the project at the Telegraph Smart Mobility Summit (where our MD, Trevor, also took part in the keynote panel on the importance of collaboration).

We’ve had a fantastic response since the launch and so now seems like the perfect opportunity to share a little more about the role of DG Cities in this exciting project. 

Endeavour is an autonomous vehicle passenger service that will be piloted in the Royal Borough of Greenwich next year.   It is the perfect fit therefore for our Smart Mobility and Autonomous Transport team, who bring a wealth of experience in this field from projects such as Smart Mobility Living Lab and GATEway.

For DG Cities, Endeavour is a multi-faceted initiative. We are leading the project’s work on public perception and service design, which has been exciting territory to cover. In addition to this, the project is also providing us with the opportunity to draw from and build upon our past connected and autonomous vehicle (CAV) research, allowing us to channel our insights and knowledge into this new service.  

During Endeavour, we will be developing a Mobility Service Assessment Framework (MSAF) with the aim of providing a data-based methodology to differentiate between various transport offers. We would like to see this framework being used by cities in the future to procure and evaluate ride-sharing services, AV taxis, minibuses, cycle schemes or any other travel modes. Our MSAF will rely on data collected during the pilots to measure a set of social, economic and environmental key performance indicators (KPIs). There are a number of different metrics one could look at, so over the past few months we have spent a great deal of time evaluating a long list of potential indicators, analysing their correlations and looking at the feasibility to actually measure them. We will be working with a prioritised list that we’ll be shaping – and likely reshaping – during the project as we begin collecting real inputs.

Prior to the rollout of the Endeavour service pilots, we’ll be designing the methodologies and working closely with our partners at Immense Simulations to make them computable. Furthermore, we’ll be assessing their relevance with interested parties, so if you’d like to be involved please get in touch. Our aim is to establish benchmarks of current service models (i.e. buses, taxis), to have a minimum bar to reach when designing the pilots.

Whilst the technical challenges and hurdles we are faced with will undoubtedly make for difficult days, the main objective is clear: ‘create a simple framework to compare mobility services, based on city priorities.’ We will be sharing more of our results with the community both at upcoming conferences and through blogs, so be sure to watch this space. 

In the meantime, you can be part of the Endeavour project now.  We’d love to hear your views on future transport, including autonomous ridesharing.  Share your opinions in this short questionnaire.