SINGAPORE: The code for crowdsourcing transport app Beeline will be made open source from October onwards, in a move that could benefit app developers looking to develop new mobility solutions.



The crowdsourcing transport app, which aims to provide more efficient shuttle bus services for commuters, was created by the Government Technology Agency (GovTech) and the Land Transport Authority (LTA) in 2015.



It allows people to pre-book express private bus rides, choosing from routes determined by crowdsourced suggestions.



Now, the code behind features such as the app's booking and bus tracking functions, as well as the algorithms behind how commuters are grouped into routes, will be made available.



Announcing GovTech's plans to make the code open source on Saturday (Sep 30), the director of the agency's data science division, Liu Feng-Yuan, likened the move to sharing the "recipe" as to how the Government built the Beeline technology.

"This is in the hope encouraging more innovation in the open-source community, and we hope that there could be a lot more extensions we did not envisage. For example, in the logistics sector - instead of ferrying people, these algorithms may be able to be used for ferrying cargo or ferrying goods."





However, key components of the code base that may compromise the security of the Beeline platform will not be made public.



With many cities facing the challenge of getting people from one place to another efficiently, smart urban mobility is a key component of Singapore's Smart Nation vision, said GovTech chief executive Jacqueline Poh.



"By open-sourcing Beeline, we hope to catalyse innovative solutions, be it by commercial operators or individual developers. We are inviting developers to improve our open-sourced code and push out new features to the benefit of citizens at a faster pace," Ms Poh said.



The first set of Beeline code will be released on Oct 1 on website GitHub.