One such collaborative project involves De Montfort University in Leicester and sustainable transport specialist, Go Travel Solutions.

Although advanced journey planning tools are freely available and are generally sophisticated and flexible, when there is disruption to a particular travel network, there is often a lack of real-time, dynamic intelligence available to the commuter.

Identifying this challenge, De Montfort University and Go Travel Solutions are working together to help develop more dynamic travel planning tools for live journeys.

De Montfort University is a partner in a £1 million EPSRC funded programme (ECDONE) to apply Evolutionary Computation (EC) to train scheduling. EC is a branch for Computational Intelligence that seeks to apply continuous optimisation to complex and challenging problems.

De Montfort University is focused on using EC for modeling of possible applications to resolve train scheduling issues.

Go Travel Solutions is a Leicester-based small medium enterprise (SME) specialising in assisting businesses to develop people based sustainable travel solutions. The company has an excellent knowledge of business travel needs, and is investing in a range of products to promote its services and to deliver travel plans specifically to business clusters under the Smartgo brand.

Go Travel Solutions, through its existing business travel networks across Leicester and Leicestershire, will provide suitable communities with which De Montfort University can test its resulting applications.

This ERDF part-funded project will be extended to consider multi-modal travel and to include passenger journey planning using the resultant rail timetable. This will help to optimise the passenger journey, taking account of personal constraints, including time, cost and route preferences.