ioki GmbH, Deutsche Bahn’s digital public transport company, will be the technology partner in the research project “Munich’s automated public transport with ridepooling, solo bus and bus platoons”, abbreviated as MINGA. Today, the consecutive partners presented the project to the public. The pilot operation of automated shuttles accompanied by a safety driver is planned from 2025. ioki, as one of the leading providers of on-demand local transport solutions, intends to provide the booking and routing software for MINGA and to set up an on-demand-service with three to five automated vehicles. The DB company already has extensive experience in including autonomous vehicles in demand-responsive public transport offers on its own platform. In the MINGA project, ioki will be involved in three out of six work packages and plans to road-test highly automated vehicles in the urban and rural public transport system together with the partners.
Automated on-demand ridepooling in the metropolitan area of Munich
As part of the project, passengers shall be able to handle the complete journey via the existing mobility-as-a-service (MaaS) platform of the city of Munich: journey planning, booking and payment. The ioki on-demand system in the background also sends information about the passengers’ pick-up and destination to the self-driving system (SDS) of the automated vehicles, which adapt their routes to the passengers’ wishes. Using the ioki algorithm, several journeys with similar target and/or pick-up location will be bundled in a vehicle (so-called ridepooling). The project’s goal is to improve individual mobility and, in particular, access to public transport by a demand-oriented mobility offering.
The research project MINGA will be funded by the Federal Ministry of Digital and Transport (BMDV) with around 13 million euros until the end of 2025 as part of the funding guideline “Autonomous and Connected Driving in Public Transport”.
More about the research project on https://muenchenunterwegs.de/angebote/minga. 
Photocredit: © MVP
