SEAT Metropolis:Lab, developing mobility solutions for smart cities
From concept to reality. The Catalan lab creates new products and services with a single goal: moving easily through the city streets.
The SEAT Metropolis:Lab in Barcelona, opened in November 2017, is part of the Volkswagen Group’s worldwide network of IT Labs: centres of excellence working on the development of new and sustainable mobility solutions for the future. Here, in this Mediterranean metropolis, smart mobility products and services are conceived, designed and developed, integrating city data, vehicle’s onboard technology and software development.
Drivers, commuters and pedestrians: the research is focused on all these categories of people, trying to best interpret the needs of each of them. Assuming that, by putting together mobile technology and Big Data, it is possible to optimise the relationship between the smart cities, their inhabitants and the mobility services, thus making people’s everyday lives safer, more sustainable and more efficient.
Among the many projects in the pipeline at the Metropolis:Lab, one is already reality. It’s “About It”, an app which is intended to improve mobility in Barcelona and which, among other functions, displays areas of the city where construction work is carried out that could affect traffic, as well as critical points with the highest concentration of traffic accidents in the city.
Other initiatives in development include Komuti, which is meant to make commuters’ lives easier by creating groups of users to promote ride sharing, and bus on demand, a project aiming to optimise bus journeys, for example by eliminating unnecessary rides at less busy times of the day, or by modifying routes on the basis of requests gathered via app in real time.
This latter initiative, developed together with the Volkswagen Data:Lab in Munich and the Volkswagen Smart:City in Wolfsburg, is being tested right in the city which is home to the Group’s headquarters, and will possibly be adapted to the characteristics of cities like Barcelona at a later stage.
Source: SEAT S.A.