Citopia MaaS
Citopia MaaS
Citopia MaaS (Mobility-as-a-Service) offers a secure, easy-to-navigate federated marketplace where users can plan, reserve, and pay for multimodal trips all in one place.
Citopia MaaS (Mobility-as-a-Service) offers a secure, easy-to-navigate federated marketplace where users can plan, reserve, and pay for multimodal trips all in one place.
Citopia MaaS Project — Transit IDEA Award
The Citopia MaaS pilot was completed in 2023 under the supervision of the Transit IDEA Program. The Transit IDEA Program is a part of the Transit Cooperative Research Program (TCRP), which is sponsored by the Federal Transit Administration (FTA). Stay tuned for the release of the Citopia MaaS project report
Citopia MaaS simplifies travel by allowing users to search, book, and pay for multimodal trips in one place. Users can customize their trip preferences and choose from various route options without the hassle of multiple logins, user cards, apps, and payment methods. Citopia MaaS unlocks secure cross-industry coordination, giving transit agencies and enterprise participants alike a new way to expand services, broaden revenue streams, access trend data, offer rewards, and address service gaps in real-time.
Overview of the Pilot and the Problem It Solves
It is estimated that currently 83% of the U.S. population lives in urban cities. This figure is projected to increase to 89% by 2050. Meanwhile, 68% of the world’s population is expected to live in urban cities by 2050. With increasing populations, cities in the U.S. and around the world are looking for solutions to manage existing infrastructure demands as well as congestion and air pollution. In addition, the mobility/transportation demand of riders is changing with the emergence of usage-based business models. The emergence of Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS) presents a promising solution to meet the growing demand for usage-based business models and effectively address pressing challenges in mobility and sustainability. However, most MaaS services today are offered by siloed centralized platforms, which lack the interoperability needed to connect distinct mobility services. These platforms also fall short of providing data privacy for riders and providers.
To this end, MOBI created Citopia MaaS, a federated Web3 marketplace which provides a secure and easy-to-use mobile app for riders to seamlessly plan and book multimodal trips from different service providers with itinerary, ticketing, and payments all in one place. The marketplace allows mobility stakeholders to securely transact and share data with assured privacy and interoperability. Citopia MaaS marketplace includes a web interface that enables service providers to securely onboard assets and offer services to riders via simple API integrations. Riders can:
- set trip preferences among fastest, cheapest, least number of transfers, and greenest routes;
- choose preferred mode(s) of transit such as bus, bike-as-a-service, and more.
The marketplace leverages state-of-the-art Web3 technologies to enable a seamless and secure MaaS experience while redefining data privacy for riders and service providers. These technologies include Self-Sovereign Digital Twins™ (SSDTs™), World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Verifiable Credentials (VCs) and Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs), and Zero-Knowledge Proofs. DIDs allow the SSDTs™ of riders, vehicles, service providers, and other entities to communicate and transact with each other via VCs — SSDTs™ are digital twins that can autonomously participate in transactions using self-sovereign identity technology. VCs are coupled with ZKPs to add greater data privacy, giving riders full ownership and control of their Personally Identifiable Information (PII) and protecting providers’ sensitive business data.
What the Pilot Demonstrated
At the end of the first stage of the project, the complete and fully functional demo of the Citopia MaaS mobile app and web interface was successfully presented to the expert advisory panel in December 2022 along with ZKP generation. The project team successfully demonstrated the creation of Citopia SSDTs™; multimodal trip planning using real-time General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) and General Bikeshare Feed Specification (GBFS) data involving bus, metro, and bike/scooter-as-as-a-service MaaS options; and trip booking, navigation, and payments on Citopia MaaS.
In the second and final stage of the project, performance testing for Citopia MaaS was carried out to evaluate the system’s suitability for operating under real-world conditions and document the findings in the final project report. This effort involved the determination of the testing approach, scope, KPIs, setup for the system components, and execution of the performance testing. The main components to be tested were the onboarding of riders and rider trip execution, which involved the querying, booking/reserving, trip execution, and invoicing of a multimodal trip. The rider onboarding flow involved the creation of DIDs (through ITN) and SSDTs™. The trip execution involved different types of VCs that are used to simulate the transactions between service providers and riders for searching, requesting/booking, and paying for different modes of transit.
The Citopia MaaS pilot successfully demonstrated mapping of Citopia technical capabilities and W3C Universal Wallet capabilities for SSDTs™ to enable business automation on Citopia MaaS and interoperability across stakeholders’ systems/platforms using W3C DID standards (different service providers and riders can communicate and transact using W3C compliant DIDs). Because Citopia MaaS also focuses on interoperability and seamless travel between siloed services, transit users will significantly benefit from not having to use multiple identities, mobile/app applications, and payment channels. Users will be able to communicate and transact with multiple MaaS providers all from a single marketplace. Citopia MaaS can play a significant role in enabling cities and metropolitan regions to implement seamless transportation and demand management strategies such as tracking real-time data trends.
Our Innovative Solution
Self-Sovereign Digital Twins™: trusted decentralized identity for interoperability and business automation
Currently, digital transactions rely on identities issued by centralized platforms to prove their credentials. However, in addition to being vulnerable to fraud, identity theft, and data leaks, centralized approaches to identity management fail to address the trust problems created by the rise of decentralized services, IOT, and Generative AI. As digitization advances, it will become increasingly challenging — and costly — to verify data authenticity, secure digital perimeters, and ensure cross-border regulation compliance. This is critical in the vehicle finance and lending sector, which includes hundreds of thousands of stakeholders in regions across the globe.
Overcoming these challenges calls for a new solution. The White House’s Federal Zero Trust Strategy (2022) underscores this need by directing federal agencies to adopt a Zero Trust framework by the end of FY 2024. Zero Trust requires every entity to authenticate and validate every other entity for every single digital transaction at all times. Since this is not possible through Web2/centralized means, we must leverage Web3 technologies and principles to unlock privacy-preserving ecosystem interoperability using Citopia Self-Sovereign Digital Twins™ (SSDTs™).
What are SSDTs™?
SSDTs™ are portable digital twins that can automatically authenticate identity and selectively disclose pertinent data for Web3 transactions at the edge. SSDTs™ combine standards from W3C, MOBI, IEEE, ISO, SAE, and others with Zero-Knowledge cryptography to offer the data privacy and autonomy needed to engage in secure, tamper-evident transactions across the connected ecosystem. SSDTs™ enable cross-industry interoperability and business automation through:
Enabling seamless verification and validation of identities and transactions
Empowering the creation of regulation-compliant data privacy solutions
Providing the ability to obtain and monetize data at the moment of transaction without the need to open up databases / store data
Serving as platform-agnostic, legacy system compatible “universal translators,” eliminating the need to build new infrastructure / APIs
