The Anonymous Widower

EventGo – Intelligent Rail Service Demand Forecasting for Event-Based Travel

This project was one of the winners in the First Of A Kind 2022 competition run by Innovate UK.

In this document, this is said about the project.

Project No: 10037294

Project title: EventGo – Intelligent Rail Service Demand Forecasting for Event-Based Travel
Lead organisation: YOU. SMART. THING. LIMITED
Project grant: £249,946

Public description: 

Aim: EventGo will demonstrate a first-of-a-kind solution for accurately predicting how large visitor events impact demand for specific railway services, generating advance insight on rail capacity, and enhancing the ability of TOC planning teams to optimally plan and deliver railway timetables and services. Data-enabled decision-making is expected to improve overall TOC operational performance, as demand is more precisely matched with supply in order to realise new cost efficiencies, improve yield, and deliver enhanced customer experiences. The project outcomes address the competition’s plan resilience and recoverability theme.

Challenge: Large visitor events create extreme demand peaks within the railway network. Though such events are often scheduled months in advance, accurately predicting how this demand is likely to impact a specific scheduled railway service is notoriously complex due to the lack of advance data about visitors’ travel plans. In leu, TOCs often rely on best guess estimations. As recent UEFA Champions League finals in Pairs demonstrated, underestimating visitor travel can have severe consequences for an organisation’s reputation, and visitor safety.

Project: A mature EventGo prototype solution will be deployed by UK TOC planning team to predict how a series of sporting fixtures between January and March 2023 in the Yorkshire region are likely to impact time-tabled railway services. During this period, partners will investigate how advanced insight generated by EventGo can be exploited by planners to make intelligent adjustments to scheduled services, e.g., adding capacity to specific services to match high
demand, to ensure optimal asset utilisation and deliver the highest level of customer experience.

Value: Demonstration in a live railway environment allows partners to both verify the accuracy of the model’s rail travel demand prediction, and to evidence the business value such intelligence can have on TOC operations. In addition, accrued results will facilitate product approval procedures and raise the visibility of the novel solution in the target market.

Consortium: The project is led by You. Smart. Thing. (“YST”), a specialist in intelligent mobility solutions, and supported by two UK TOCs, a top-tier sporting institution and stadium management company, and regional government partners. Professional project management is provided by In The Round (“ITR”), a UK-based consultancy specialising large visitor events travel management.

My Thoughts And Conclusions

I have been caught up in bad event planning several times and feel that this project could be very useful to plan passenger movement at large events.

I doubt, it will be a solution, that only has UK applications.

November 18, 2022 - Posted by AnonW | Computing, Transport/Travel | First Of A Kind 2022, Innovate UK, Software