IXSI - Interface for X-Sharing Information

The increasing demand for mobility, especially for individual transport, leads to more pollution, congested cities and shortage of parking. New ways of mobility could mitigate these issues. Unfortunately, such forms of mobility, i.e. carsharing, are usually isolated services, because of the missing integration with other mobility modes. Our aim is to offer a combination of heterogeneous services on a single platform. We argue that such an integration allows optimal offers and higher usability and therefore results with a higher acceptance among travelers. Embedding a vehicle rental system into a travel information system information-wise is a step forward. For this purpose, we developed an interface for x-sharing information, short IXSI, specialized in connecting vehicle rental systems with a travel information system. IXSI is an XML-based, B2B interface with functions for, e.g., exchanging basic vehicle data and price information. The interface enables travel information systems to perform bookings of carsharing and bikesharing vehicles and therefore allows the customer to use traditional public transport services as well as rental services seamlessly. Furthermore, we briefly present our IXSI implementations on travel information and vehicle rental system side.