Comprehensive Operations and Planning Environment for Improving BRT Operations

Increasing BRT ridership using ITS requires a holistic approach that addresses overall system performance. ITS applications supporting bus rapid transit (BRT) are typically single purpose applications. These applications usually support one facet of transit/transportation activities, e.g. transit planning, transit operations/maintenance, or transit end users. These "stovepipe" applications generally have no automated linkage and do not provide facile means for data developed in one application to be used or shared with another application. The Department of Defense has recently explored using autonomous software agents to make decisions regarding likely future actions of combatants. These approaches utilize complex databases representing the situational environment to provide information to "smart" decision making software for making informed decisions. There are parallels between the military problem and bus rapid transit systems and a similar approach to BRT could enhance the utility, efficiency, and usability of the system. This in turn would lead to increased utilization. BRT is one aspect of a larger regional transportation system. The proposed research explores developing intelligent applications and a database topology usable by all facets of the transit system. The system applications would interact with the "smart" geospatial database and allow appications to "learn" from each other to support the BRT system.