Smart bus stops and traffic control with Galileosky

Project background

The carrier serves 4 bus routes. Every day buses transport passengers. All of them are equipped with a system for displaying the route on an electronic board and an autoinformer for stops announcement.

The company faced with the challenge of tracking buses’ schedule and move it according to traffic situation in rush-hours. So that it was important to set up a voice communication between the driver and the dispatcher. Also, for the drivers’ safety, it was required to connect the panic button for use in emergency situations.

In order to display up-to-date information about the approaching transport on the boards installed at stops, it was necessary to set up data transmission from buses to the platform served by the one of the local telecom companies. The platform aggregates data from urban transport monitoring systems and displays information on the approach of the bus to a stop.

Challenges

• Display route data on 4 displays: number, start and end points of the route, time, date and name of the next stop
• Announce stops using an autoinformer
• Display data about the nearest bus on bus stops
• Set up voice communication with the driver
• Quickly respond in case of emergency (accident or driver attack)

Solution

The main elements in the system are Galileosky 7.0 trackers and scoreboards. The engineers used ITline LED electronic displays, which do not require additional integration via Easy Logic. The point is that the parameters for integrating the ITline scoreboard with Galileosky trackers are already in the devices firmware. Therefore, the specialists simply chose the necessary periphery, i.e. scoreboard, in the settings list and connected them via RS 485.

Each bus was equipped with 4 scoreboards: front, side, back and inside the cabin. The front and side panels display the name of the route and its’ number with the info where its starts and ends. The rear one is the route number, and the display inside the cabin is the time, date and name of the next stop.

At the stage of debugging the solution, integrator specialists faced with the problem: long words did not fit into one line. As planned, they should be played in a circle, however, long names began to be shown in the reverse order, from right to left.

At the next stage, the connectors of the standard bus audio system were plugged in the tracker outputs, and geofences were set up to announce the bus stops. However, conventional memory cards, which stored information about stops and audio recordings, quickly failed. After replacing them with Industrial-type memory cards, the problem was solved. This prevented employees from frequent on-site visits to replace cards.

To ensure communication with the driver, a PTT was connected. So the dispatcher could directly call the Galileosky device and talk with the driver via voice communication. An alarm button was also installed so that the driver himself could contact the dispatcher. When you press it, the system registers the time, place, determines the vehicle and sends data to the monitoring server.