Road traffic open data in Sweden: Availability and commercial exploitation - A research study on the state of open transportation data in Sweden

This chapter includes a description of how the study was conducted. In order to explore the possibilities for private companies to use open data, an extensive literature review was conducted. Furthermore, this helped to get familiarized with the subject of open data and understand how it is utilized today by public companies. While researching different methods for data analytics that are being used in transportation, it was found that predictive analytics was one of the most prominent methods as it can be used in numerous ways in order to improve predictions and planning within organizations. The use of predictive analytics in transportation includes predicting delays and traffic conditions which were found to be appropriate areas of analytics with regards to the types of open data that are commonly available. Hence, these will be the areas of transport analytics that will be focused on in this study. In order to analyze the full potential of open transport data, both as a means of improving existing businesses as well as to allow for new business opportunities to originate, the methodology had to be considered accordingly. To scope out opportunities for improvement of business activities, research projects were reviewed where a number of types of open transport-related data were used to predict future outcomes of traffic conditions and events in public transportation that could have potential impacts on how daily activities within transportation organizations are performed. The projects were chosen based on the potential accessibility that the data used for the analysis has in Swedish open data sources, in order to make sure that corresponding solutions to the problems are feasible to perform in Sweden. Furthermore, in order to analyze the potential for new businesses to arise from available open data, several existing companies that have gained their success through the use of such data were studied to gain an insight into how value can be extracted from it. To analyze the accessibility of relevant open data in Sweden, Trafiklab, and Trafikverket, two open data sources for transportation-related data have been used. These were chosen in a screening method of the biggest open data sources that offer a large amount of data publicly in Sweden.Incomin