Designing Decision Support Systems for Rural Mobility Enhancement

Sabine Janzen, Hannah Stein, Lotfy Abdel Khaliq, Florian Hergert, Wolfgang Maass

Abstract: Mobility in rural regions is critical for ensuring access to essential services such as education, healthcare, and employment. However, rural mobility remains largely individualized, with heavy reliance on private cars-leading to environmental, social, and infrastructural challenges. Despite increasing data availability from GPS, mobile devices, and public transport applications, data-driven approaches for generating integrated mobility insights tailored to specific rural areas remain underdeveloped. This paper addresses this gap by investigating how decision support systems (DSS) can be designed to provide actionable, region-specific mobility insights for policymakers, businesses, and public transport providers. Following a Design Science Research (DSR) methodology, we identified factors of mobility mode choice. From this, we derived meta-requirements and proposed a set of design principles for data-driven DSS in rural mobility contexts. These principles were implemented in a DSS for the Saarland region of Germany and evaluated with policymakers and public transport planners. Our findings contribute both conceptual design knowledge and practical guidance, demonstrating how DSS can foster more efficient, inclusive, and sustainable rural mobility planning.

External IDs:dblp:conf/bpmds/JanzenSKH025