Viktoria Institute is a non-profit IT-research institute located at Lindholmen in Gothenburg in Sweden. Viktoria institute is focusing on automotive and transport informatics and employs approximately 30 researchers. Our projects are mainly directed towards five different application areas closely connected to the Automotive and Transport industries.
One of these areas is sustainable transports. This competence area covers applied research with industry actors targeting IT applications that support transportation practices. Utilizing mobile devices embedded in vehicles and stationary systems placed in offices, three examples of IT application areas in the road transport industry are transport management, intelligent transports, and remote vehicle diagnostics. In particular, Viktoria’s research focuses on how information infrastructures can be designed to leverage core business activities of highly mobile organizations and how distributed computing and communication capabilities can enable such organizations to exploit resources and explore business opportunities. Given this research direction, key questions concern standards design and diffusion and architectural innovation.
One of the major research projects in this area is Innovation for Sustaianable Everyday Travel (ISET) where we address issues realted to trafiklab.se: With the pace in which information technology in society is changing, will not the demands for support and information from everyday traveler also change? Should the public transport authorities still deliver information services all the way to the passenger, thereby forced to cope with the rapid development technology or should they instead deliver a solid information infrastructure, where open innovation and commercial actors are generating the final product? Can digital services increase environmental awareness among travelers, and actually change behavior towards a more sustainable way of travel? These questions are the starting point of a four-year research program in the Västra Götaland Region ( "Innovation for sustainable everyday travel”).
The project will develop understanding of how digital information infrastructure and related services can contribute to the expansion sustainable travel in the transport system. The program includes and coordinates several projects within the personal transportation area with different focus, financiers and operators to enrich a large-scale initiative.
As a part of this project, Viktoria actively studies and contributes to a further development of trafiklab.se. Besides arranging events like travelhack and influencing the design of trafiklab.se based on our research findings, we will alse publish API's related to sustainable transportation.