OREANDA-NEWS. Alstom concluded yesterday its first hackathon in France aimed at developing applications for connected metros. The prizes were handed out by Henri Poupart-Lafarge, Alstom Chairman and CEO, and Xavier Niel, Principal of Ecole 42 [1]. The projects submitted by the two winning teams were Navoxi and Lineo.

On 17 and 18 March, Alstom launched an unprecedented collaboration with Ecole 42 via a hackathon based on the theme of the connected metro. The challenge for the teams of student coders was to imagine, over two days, the metro of 2030 by coming up with a suggestion for connected mobility that revolutionizes passenger experience. The task is designed to open new avenues for reflection and offer solutions for journeys that are more fluid, more pleasant and more connected than ever.  

To ensure the best possible working conditions, a team of Alstom experts was on hand throughout the hackathon to reply to the questions of the students of Ecole 42, stimulate the creative process, and ensure the feasibility of the projects under preparation.  

The 95 students who participated in the competition presented their ideas via prototypes based on mobile applications, services, the IoT (Internet of Things) or more simply by creating an API (Application Programming Interface) after more than 40 hours of work.

The prize for “Best Project” went to the project Lineo. The developers started from the premise that in 2030, metro users will be in possession of intelligent, connected glasses and will thus be able to receive, thanks to their application, data related to traffic, the metro occupancy rate, the network, etc. The operator would therefore be able to collect data linked to passenger movements and adapt traffic flows accordingly. 

The prize for “Best Code” went to the project Navoxi, which, via beacons [2] present in the corridors of the metro, optimises passenger movements and provides guidance while changing trains. Passengers would therefore benefit from step-by-step navigation, without GPS.

Alstom also awarded three special prizes, inviting the teams to continue developing their ideas and to come and present them again to the members of the jury at Alstom’s Saint-Ouen headquarters in a few weeks’ time to determine the feasibility of developing them in an incubator. These were the projects Auto Wash, via which robots would be sent to clean the metro at the end of the line on every journey, Save my place, enabling passengers with reduced mobility to reserve their seats in advance and “unlock” them once they arrive inside the metro car, and Liv’In Travel, which would project information onto the walls and windows of the metro during the journey.

[1] Ecole 42: a private French computer programming school founded by Nicolas Sadirac, Kwame Yamgnane and Florian Bucher, as well as Xavier Niel.

[2] Bluetooth transmitters which notify their presence to smartphones in their perimeter and trigger specific actions, notably geolocalisation