Transport analytics in action: a cloud-based decision support system for efficient city bus transportation

Abstract

Optimising city bus transport operations helps conserve fuel by providing the urban transport service as efficiently as possible. This study develops a Cloud-based Decision Support System (C-DSS) for transport analytics. The C-DSS is based on an intelligent model on location of depots for opening new depots and/or closing a few existing depots and allocation of city-buses to depots. The C-DSS is built on the Cloud Computing architecture with three layers and includes an efficient and simple greedy heuristic algorithm. Using modern information and communications technology tools, the proposed C-DSS minimizes the cost of city bus transport operations and in turn to reduce fuel consumption and CO2 emissions in urban passenger transport. The proposed C-DSS is demonstrated for its workability and evaluated for its performance on 25 large scale pseudo data generated based on the observation from Bangalore Metropolitan Transport Corporation (BMTC) in India.