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Dynamic Bus Scheduling at SMAC Center

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SMAC Center (Smart City Center)

SMAC Center (Smart City Center) is an administrative control center for SMC. It is aimed to improve service delivery, optimally utilise municipal assets and bring in synergy between different departmental activities by effective monitoring of city operations.

Brief Description

SMAC Center helps to SMC as well as Surat citizens in multiple ways:

  • It helps identification of abnormal events and take corrective actions.
  • Cross department collaboration helps to improve quality of service.
  • Early identification of complaint helps in early resolution.
  • Property Tax: The Command and Control Center helps in identification of city areas where tax recovery requires attention. Concern officers of the area are notified to take necessary actions.
  • Transport Monitoring: The Command and Control Center helps SMC in monitoring of BRTS and City Bus Operations by identifying the issues like Speed violation, Headway & bunching, Trip not initiated and Non Stoppage
  • GIS Integration: The GIS team deployed at Command and Control Center integrates all Building Plan permissions on GIS Platforms and regularly updates SMC facilities on SMC’s GIS Platform.
  • Health Monitoring: Monitoring of Vector Born diseases is done through Command and Control Center by early identification of malaria cases and mosquito breeding spots on GIS Map.
  • Solid Waste Management: Monitoring of Door to Door Garbage Collection using RFIP and GPS based system is done through Command and Control Center to ensure maximum coverage and adherence of garbage collection activity across the city.
  • Citizen Grievance Analysis: Grievance Analysis team is deployed at Command and Control Center whose main responsibility is to identify the chronic issues in city and identify the areas where complaints of same nature are repeated so that additional attention can be given to such complaints. Further, complaints pertaining to critical categories like contaminated water, dead animals etc. are directly monitored by the team deployed at Command and Control Center to ensure that such complaints are redressed immediately.
  • CCTV Monitoring: The CCTVs deployed by Surat City Police across the city are used by SMC for identification of administrative issues and proactively resolve them. The CCTV System is also used to monitor the areas where water logging happens at the time of heavy rainfall.
  • Apart from above, monitoring of Swachhta App of MoUD, Automatic Fare Collection System for BRTS and City buses and monitoring of Street Lights is also done at Command and Control Center.

Vehicle Planning and Scheduling System

In recent times, it has been realized that a sustainable transportation system must include a strong public transportation system (or transit system) — building more roads for the ever increasing number of private transportation vehicles (automobiles) is not the solution. However, for a public transportation system to be successful in attracting passengers, the system must be efficient. A transit system (which typically consists of many transit routes, collectively referred to as the transit route network or the transit route set) will be efficient if the transit route network and the schedules of the routes are efficient. Hence, it is imperative that procedures for efficient route set and schedule design are available in order to achieve efficient transit systems.

Surat Municipal Corporation had inaugurated BRTS service in January 2014 with 10.3 km of stretch and expanded to 108 km network (highest operational network in the country). After that in November 2016, Surat Municipal Corporation inaugurated Surat city bus service and expanded to 491 kilometre of network in SMC limits and urban agglomeration. With increase in route network and buses substantially, there were challenges like increase in overlapping of the network, no integrated schedules between the routes, no variation in fleet utilization across the month causing higher operational ratio and less supply of buses meeting it’s actual demand. Hence, it is important for any public transport service to have properly designed bus schedules as it improves the level of service offered to passengers while minimising operational cost for operators.

Vehicle Planning and Scheduling project was launched for transforming its public bus transport system in the city. Building Dynamism into the transport system brings in the convergence of technologies providing a synergetic transformation in the planning of Public transport operations and commuter experience. The inclusion of this dynamism into Sitilink has resulted in reducing significant operational costs with further increase in revenues through demand-responsive modules. This further focuses to shift the Surat citizens transport model share from private vehicles to Public transport through data backed scientific planning approach. Dynamic Scheduling identifies and defines the goals and objectives to be achieved and formulates automated strategies to achieve them in a controlled manner as desired. This includes the examination of past, present, and prospective trends and issues associated with the demand for the movement of people. With this platform, Sitilink has created a logical decision making tool and environment that in turn result in providing effective and attractive transport, reduced Operational KMs, reduced Dead KMs, optimization of both vehicle and crew resources, reduced carbon footprint, increased operational areas, realtime simulations, cross networks, new and faster routes, passenger comfort etc. These are all emerging indicators of attracting commuters by choice to its public transport in a cost effective manner.