Cities are no longer managing transport in isolation. They are balancing climate targets, land-use choices, equity, public health, economic activity and citizen expectations. Decision-intelligence platforms help authorities connect these dimensions, test scenarios and make transparent, evidence-based decisions.
What Decision-Intelligence Platforms Do
At its core, decision-intelligence software helps planners model how people, services and places interact, test the effects of policy or infrastructure changes before implementation and produce evidence-based recommendations for sustainable urban and regional strategies.
Modern platforms go far beyond static traffic models. They integrate:
- Land-use and transport demand models — linking where people live, work, and travel
- Activity-based demand models — capturing daily travel patterns and trip chains at the individual level
- Traffic simulation — modelling road networks, public transport, and new mobility services
- Environmental and emissions assessment — quantifying CO₂ and air quality impacts of different scenarios
The Key Challenge: Fragmented Tools
One of the biggest problems cities face is that these capabilities are spread across incompatible tools. Land-use models, demand models, and traffic simulators are developed by different vendors, use different data formats, and require specialists in each. Connecting them is manual, error-prone, and expensive.
The traditional approach forces transport agencies to either:
- Use a single vendor's ecosystem (PTV, Aimsun) and accept its limitations, or
- Pay to train staff across multiple tools and manually integrate outputs
A New Generation of Integrated Decision Platforms
This is the problem that HarmonyMS was designed to solve. Developed through the EU H2020-funded HARMONY project, it is a software-agnostic, modular platform that allows transport modellers to connect existing models — including commercial tools like PTV VISUM and Aimsun — through standardized adaptors.
Rather than replacing the models planners already rely on, HarmonyMS provides a common framework for linking them, managing input-output data flows, and evaluating scenarios across strategic, tactical, and operational planning levels.
What HarmonyMS Has Been Applied To
HarmonyMS has already been deployed in real-world planning processes across Europe, including:
- Rotterdam, Netherlands — strategic transport and land-use planning
- Oxfordshire, UK — sustainable mobility planning and scenario testing
- Turin, Italy — multimodal demand and emissions modelling
- Athens, Greece — urban mobility intervention assessment
- Larnaca and Heraklion — emerging deployments under EU projects
What to Look for in Transport Planning Software
When evaluating platforms for your authority or consultancy, consider:
- Model agnosticism — can it connect to models you already use?
- Activity-based demand modelling — does it capture individual travel behaviour, not just aggregate flows?
- Multimodal coverage — does it handle walking, cycling, public transport, and new mobility services (e-scooters, shared cars, AVs)?
- Scenario management — can you easily define, compare, and communicate the results of different policy options?
- Data integration — what input data formats does it support, and how does it connect to travel survey data?
The Role of Travel Data in Transport Planning
Transport models are only as good as the data that feeds them. Origin-destination matrices, modal split data, and activity patterns all need to come from somewhere — typically a combination of household travel surveys, GPS traces, and administrative data.
This is where tools like MobyApp come in: a smartphone-based travel survey platform that automates the collection of multi-day travel and activity diaries, feeding high-quality behavioural data directly into planning models.
Looking Ahead: The Opportunity for Sustainable Decision Intelligence
The opportunity is not only commercial. Public authorities increasingly need integrated evidence, transparent modelling and participatory processes to make decisions that can stand up to climate, equity and accountability pressures.
MobyX is at the intersection of this shift: developing tools that help organisations collect reliable data, model possible futures, evaluate impacts and make better decisions for people, places and the planet.