openmobilityfoundation / openmobilityfoundation/mobility-data-specification

MDS 2.0 - round-trip car sharing and reservation/reserved

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Description

We experience confusion regarding how the terms "reservation" and "reserved" are being used in MDS 2.0 in relation to use cases of station-based car sharing (A to A), and would like to get some clarification on how to interpret and use the specification!

I've tried to sum up our confusion in the following list:

1. The MDS 2.0-documentation states at first that a reservation

… is the duration the customer has continuous exclusive access to the vehicle whether parked or in motion.

2 which again may be considered a journey_attribute:

reservation_id (UUID, optional): unique identifier for an entire car share reservation, tied across multiple journeys and therefore trips.

The definition of reservation given above is all in line with how we use the term reservation in car sharing operations.

3 But - when describing vehicle states, «reserved» points towards the state where a car is only reserved by the user (and not put to motion).

This differs from the definition of «reservation» as mentioned in point 1 above.

4. Then it follows up that the transition to/from "reserved" is triggered by the event_types:

reservation_start
reservation_stop

5 At the same time, the trip_type label «reservation» points towards a trip where the car is in motion and reserved by a customer (but not being driven by the customer):

en route to pickup a customer who has made a reservation, with no passengers in the vehicle

So - to sum up:

A) We need some clarification on the use of terms "reservation" and "reserved".

One suggestion that could help out, would be to rename event_types "Reservation_start/reservation_stop" to "reserved_start/reserved_stop" to hinder confusion.

B) We're struggling a bit to see the use case where a reservation consists of several journeys, especially when the documentation states that a reservation = continuous exclusive access. Right now, it seems like that a reservation is all equal to a journey, and may consist of no more information.

It would make sense if one opens up for concurring reservations (e.g. companies making a reservation for a car every monday (multiple journeys)), but then it still would be available for the other days - and hence not continuously exclusive for the entire duration of reservation.

Reservation

(We've put together a Slides-document to present several of our questions in relation to MDS 2.0 and car sharing, you can find this here: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1AbA-gnwvKwZ8BDz7Xp5DzFFRdVNyuiQUHkNIkVn75nY/edit?usp=sharing)

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First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start with the MDS 2.0 documentation sections defining reservation, reserved, reservation_start, reservation_stop, trip_type, and reservation_id. Compare those definitions against the station-based car-sharing use cases described here; done means the terminology and multi-journey interpretation are clarified consistently, including whether the proposed event-name change is needed.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Domain
documentation
Issue type
Documentation
Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
25/100

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