Transmodel tutorials  have been grouped and organized in the following main sections:

Technical User Support Organisation

Rationale of Transmodel

Public Transport is facing competition from ever-increasing private car transport and a general trend to a decreasing public transport demand. Most of the transport authorities in European countries express concerns about this evolution, leading to road congestion, air pollution, accidents, etc., and consider how they may reverse this negative trend by improving the public transport supply.

One of the main ways of improving the efficiency of a transport system and of individual operators is to develop the use of digitalised information and communication technologies and services (exchange and publication of information), to support both internal operations and communication with other service providers.

Transmodel is aimed at providing a reference for data structures, destined to be common to the public transport domain throughout the European Union.

Transmodel main characteristics and implementations

In order to be adapted to the evolution of software and hardware techniques, Transmodel, the Reference Public Transport Data Model, is technology independent: it refers to the conceptual level of data, which is known to be the more stable element of an information system.

The CEN/TS 16614, known as NeTEx, is the standard implementation of parts of Transmodel representing the planned (static) information and providing standard data formats for data exchanges using Transmodel data structures. EN 15531 (Service interface for real-time information relating to public transport operations, known as SIRI) is based on Transmodel and concerns dynamic information.

Transmodel-related actions

In order to keep Transmodel into a widely known and accepted standard, it is necessary in particular:

  • to promote the data model to public transport authorities and decision makers: to present its contents, evolution and usefulness [1], providing information on current implementations [2], its relationship to national standards and strategic investments [3];
  • to present the data model to software suppliers, to the technical staff of authorities/operators [4];
  • to present Transmodel to academic institutions that teach software engineering, transport engineering and transport management subjects to students [5] or engage in research in transport systems in order to use it as a systematically engineered example of large scale model driven design for information systems in a an important functional area: Transmodel provides a good example for teaching both general system design and transport specific concepts [6], as well as a proven semantic model of real-world transport systems for research purposes;
  • to improve/update/extend the model in order to keep it adapted to the reality of public transport in Europe and to harmonise it as far as possible with other related standards1, in particular, keep Transmodel up-to-date if an implementation standard (e.g. NeTEx, SIRI, etcetera) would submit a justified change request. A formal method allowing for conformity check is in this context particularly useful;
  • to produce detailed data model documentation.

The project team (PT0302) of CEN TC278 WG3 (Public Transport) subgroup 4 (Data Models) has dedicated considerable efforts to support all these objectives in the time period 2016-2019, producing Transmodel v 6.0 (EN 12896-1 to -8 and CEN/TR 12896-9).

Transmodel future

However, if Transmodel has to be kept alive, a Transmodel User Support Group should take care of it and its users continuing the actions described above.

The Programme Support Action (PSA) Data4PT 2020-2024 is meant to contribute to this objective [8].

References

  1. Transmodel at a glance
  2. Transmodel implementations
  3. Transmodel White paper, BIP Case Study
  4. Transmodel tutorial
  5. Transmodel Textbook for students
  6. Methodology used by Transmodel
  7. Standards harmonisation
  8. Organisation Groupe Support

Methodology used in Transmodel

For the definition of Transmodel, the object–oriented modelling notation UML 2 is used for describing, specifying, documenting and visualizing the conceptual data model.

For more details about the methodology used in Transmodel, you can download the following short guide: Use of UML in Transmodel.