Open data from taxis and Bluetooth detectors to extract congestion and mobility patterns in Thessaloniki

Thessaloniki hosts one of the largest mobility living labs in Europe, aiming at fostering innovation to the mobility sector. Data is a key aspect of the living lab, allowing to depict mobility and congestion patterns to better manage traffic and support decision making. Most of the public and private stakeholders of the Thessaloniki mobility eco-system are part of the living lab and provide real-time data to the host of the living lab (CERTH-HIT), receiving added-value services from their participation. Thus, structured and unstructured Transportation and Mobility related datasets generated by various both conventional and innovative data sources, namely floating taxis and Bluetooth detectors, are being processed into “Thessaloniki's Smart Mobility Living Lab”, the data analysis and modelling laboratory of the Hellenic Institute of Transport (HIT). As most datasets are usually generated by high-rate and high-density machines, an intricate and efficient back-end pipeline is in place to ensure the proper collection, transformation, combination, and processing of such datasets in almost real time. In addition, many static datasets are kept and updated regularly.