I want to ride my bicycle: A microservice-based use case for a MaaS architecture

This work presents a use case on multimodal urban paths in a smart mobility context. The proposed solution builds on the experience already matured and developed by the authors in different fields: crowdsourcing and sensing done by users to gather data related to urban barriers and facilities, computation of personalized paths for users with special needs, and integration of open data provided by bus companies to identify the actual accessibility features and estimate the real arrival time of vehicles at stops. In terms of functionality, the first “monolithic” prototype fulfilled the goal of composing the aforementioned pieces of information to support citizens with reduced mobility (users with disabilities and/or elderly people) in their urban movements. In this paper, we describe a service-oriented architecture that exploits the microservices orchestration paradigm to enable the creation of new services and to make the management of the various data sources easier and more effective. The manuscript demonstrates the effectiveness of the approach showing a successful use case of a service that take into account multimodal paths, by involving cyclists, bicycle lanes, and bike sharing services in a urban environments. Such a use case take into account the user's interface and interaction mechanisms, which are strongly affected by the context of use.