Features/tools for agencies staff

[sba...@gmail.com]

Dear All,

I work for a travel agency in Argentina (public transportation urban buses), and we're considering replacing our current GPS system with open source tools. We use the actual system to monitor our fleet from a control center. It uses dedicated hardware on each bus to aquire GPS position and relay it to our server. This whole system is going obsolete, and our vendor is charging us a lot of money to upgrade (vendor lockin), so now is the time to evaluate other options.

Our most basic requirements are:

  - Aquire GPS information on each bus and send it to our control center

  - Display fleet information in our control center, preferrably using cartography of our choice (Google maps, maps.me, Garmin, etc)

  - Show the bus drivers turn by turn directions along with deviation (in minutes) from scheduled route time

The initial setup we're considering is the following:

  - To use a regular Android smartphone on each bus, probably running Osmand (I'm already in contact with the development team to request quotation for some new custom features)

  - To use OneBusAway as a platform to monitor our fleet and to offer riders real time information

So my questions to this group are:

  - Does this setup make any sense? I'm not an expert on this subject.

  - Are there other Open Source solutions I'm missing that could improve this setup?

  - Can you point me to some kind of documentation explaining in detail what features does OneBusAway to agencies staff in regards to operation control?

Thanks for any insight on this matter.

Best regards,

Santiago

[Sheldon A. Brown]

On Thu, Sep 14, 2017 at 10:46 AM, <sba...@gmail.com> wrote:

> So my questions to this group are:
>
> - Does this setup make any sense? I'm not an expert on this subject.
> - Are there other Open Source solutions I'm missing that could improve
> this setup?
> - Can you point me to some kind of documentation explaining in detail what
> features does OneBusAway to agencies staff in regards to operation control?
>
> Thanks for any insight on this matter.
>
> Best regards,
> Santiago

This has been covered a couple of times over the past few years,
though mainly on the onebusaway-developers list. In short, in theory
it can be done. In practice, its a lot of work and you really don't
want to use non-ruggidized hardware. With that said, read on:


https://groups.google.com/forum/#!search/onebusaway-developers$20transitime/onebusaway-developers/cnCHsh6I2-I/aEMVdgMhFQAJ

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!search/onebusaway-developers$20transitime/onebusaway-developers/pJ_CrobvVZA/5efgiX9ZAAAJ

and on the gtfs list:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/gtfs-realtime/OK7sDONN5O4

And let me know if you have any further questions.

Sheldon

[sba...@gmail.com]

Hi Sheldon,

Thanks for your insightfull response.

Regarding the non-ruggedized hardware, we're thinking about building an antivibratory stand for the smartphone. If that doesn't work, we'll probably go with a regular AVL. We really want to make it work with a smartphone though, as we can use several other features such as communication with the drivers, OBD2 link, etc.

So I have a new question for you: do you think we can get commercial support from OneBusAway or from their developers to make this work as soon as possilbe? We have a very limited time frame to come up with a fully functional demo (three months tops).

Best regards,

Santiago