What is TIDES?

[john....@metrotransit.org]

The Transit ITS Data Exchange Specification (TIDES) establishes a common structure for storing and accessing data from intelligent transportation systems (ITS) that support transit operations, including automatic vehicle location (AVL), automatic passenger counter (APC) and automatic fare collection (AFC) systems. 

 

The data generated by the systems has several characteristics that make it difficult to work with:

• Very large data sets
  
• Poor data quality
  
• Poorly integrated with other data
  
• Many different vendors with different data structures

TIDES helps to address these issues by allowing transit agencies, researchers, and others to share processes that address data quality and integrate data from multiple systems.  In other to share these processes, TIDES

 

Succesful development and implementation of TIDES will increase the value of ITS data to transit agencies and others.

 

In order to create TIDES, there are three key steps that need to occur

 

First, a critical mass of transit agencies and transit data users must come together to ensure that the eventual TIDES design is defined broadly enough to be of use widely in the industry. 

 

Second, the core TIDES data structures, APIs, and processor functionalities must be defined, developed, implemented, and tested.

 

And third, the processors must be designed, programmed, and tested.