Public Transport Management in Operation

The need to cope with service disruptions constitutes one of the central aspect for real-time public transport management. Typical examples of service disruptions include delays, malfunctioning vehicles, and the need for a detour or a limitation.

 

Figure 1: Initial Display of the FLUIDS Public Transport demonstrator 

With the current information system, the center operator has to diagnose and identify the disruptions in order to select one of the standard procedures to manage the problem. The relevant data provided by the service information system result from an automatic vehicle monitoring subsystem and include also notifications from drivers as well as other, manually entered information concerning problem situations.

The new FLUIDS -based intelligent interface (see Fig. 1) sits on top of the underlying real-time control system and provides additional decision support. FLUIDS detects and classifies potential service disruptions in real-time and presents suitable control actions for restoring the normal service. With the new setting, the operator interacts with the intelligent user interface and simply selects among the proposed control actions.

 

Figure 2: FLUIDS Interface Proposing a Limitation Procedure 

Figure 2 shows an example for the automatic suggestion of corrective actions in response to a conditional query from the operator. The presentation sub-window on the right displays information related to the previous question (``What can be done if reserve vehicles are not available?'') of the operator. In this kind of presentation, the graphical display of the affected line exploits dynamic data from automatic vehicle monitoring to indicate vehicle locations. The system operating in Turin measures vehicle positions in terms of the distance from the starting location of the course of the line.

 

Figure 3: Predicting the Evolution of a Problem Situation 

As demonstrated in Fig. 3, the intelligent interface can not only provide problem descriptions but may generate as well predictions that estimate the short term evolution of a given situation.

The multimedia interface of the FLUIDS demonstrator for the public transport application is available online and may be started using the Java applet below.

Please note that this application requires Java version 1.1.

 

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