Intelligent Transportation Systems
Goals
Improve the transportation systems to, within, and from Georgia Tech.
Issues Involved or Addressed
GT buses circulate on fixed routes with small headways. Such systems are subject to bus bunching large headways tend to grow even larger and small headways tend to shrink still more. As a result, some riders wait a long time for service, and then see one full bus followed by another that is nearly empty. Bunching is the largest single complaint in most metropolitan bus systems.
To date: The team has built a forecasting, computation, and communication system that coordinates the buses to reduce bunching and so provide better service. Tablet computers on the buses report GPS data in real time to a central server, which processes it and then communicates instructions to drivers via the tablets. Current focus: fine-tune the system and extend it to other GT routes and off-campus. For more info: http://www.NextBUZZ.gatech.ed