Research project

Improving customer experience while ensuring data privacy for intelligent mobility

Project overview

This project investigated the trade-offs rail passengers might face between data privacy and improvements to the customer experience, particularly passengers with special journey requirements and future ticketing systems. Research areas included:

- the development of an effective trust framework to enable customer control over data privacy
- the development of data aggregation techniques which aid the provision of an improved customer experience without compromising data anonymisation
- testing the applicability of these frameworks and techniques to potential future ticketing solutions
- developing use case scenarios for systems to improve the rail customer experience
- assessing the demand and environmental impacts of providing an improved customer experience enabled by these systems.

The initial focus was on analysing a set of customer complaints in order to ascertain the factors which can lead to a degraded customer experience, and understand how individual context can make a difference. This helped build up a picture of where the potential trade-offs between data privacy and customer experience might lie.

The second phase of this research involved carrying out on-train stated preference surveys on the Great Western Railway Network to assess the trade-offs passengers are prepared to make between provision of personal data and an improved journey experience during times of disruption.

Staff

Lead researcher

Professor Simon Blainey PhD, FRGS, FHEA, MCIHT, CMILT

Professor of Sustainable Transport

Research interests

  • Rail demand and operations modelling
  • GIS and transport
  • Transport decision support systems
Connect with Simon

Collaborating research institutes, centres and groups

Research outputs