A digital ecosystem for optimizing service reliability in public transport

Automatic vehicle location (AVL) and automatic passenger counting (APC) systems can generate a huge quantity and variety of operational, spatial, and temporal data. This potentially allows the discovery of new ways to enhance service quality and transport efficiency by utilizing AVL-APC inputs. There is currently no framework for implementing full service quality improvement cycles from automated data (Boyle 2008) and this motivates our case study. The objective of this research is to apply a digital ecosystem metaphor that extends the use of AVL and APC data for the benefit of transit agencies. The framework concentrates on offering bus service reliability in addition to improving headway, minimizing passenger wait time, and maintaining passenger comfort as well as supporting real-time proactive and reactive scheduling and resource adaptation.