Wialon and NimBus: controlling passenger transportation near Mongolia

There’s a backstory. December, 2017.

“Since I was a child, Tyva remains the same,” – recalls Christine shrinking from cold on the bus stop, – “In winter, it feels most keenly: a good thing about public transport in Kyzyl is that it’s running. If it kept to the schedule, it would make people excited. And the only one who brought NimBus here was Harry Potter”.

Christine gets back to reality: the bus is late for 8 minutes, the feet started freezing right after she left the apartment, people continue arriving to the stop. Inside the bus, they’ll be packed.

Christine, a manager at “M2M Telematics Siberia” gets to work, rewarms her legs for half an hour, and calls Municipal Service Department which is in charge of public transportation. At the end of the day, the administration gets a commercial offer for Wialon and arrange a meeting with Christine. 

Reporting on the situation

During the meeting Christine learns about the contractors offering public transportation to the city. Those are share taxi (jitney) drivers that you can’t control, except for the time they actually start working. And city bus drivers who have to meet the obligation under the contract, particularly:

• Starting the route on time 

• Route performance without deviations

• No delays or moving ahead of schedules

The thing is that there was no tool to prove before Wialon appeared.

Сonnected buses ready

Christine accepts the work: buses are equipped with Granit terminals with a microphone set, or Signal, Arnavi, and Galileosky GPS trackers. PP-01 passenger counter sensors were added differentially. This way Wialon got 120 new units.

When demonstrating the system, Christine supposed that the Routes module would cover all the client’s needs. But the idea was rejected. No one was enthusiastic about learning the advanced functionality of the system. At this point, the task changed – not only to solve the problem but to make it simple. After the brainstorm, several Wialon modules were added to the solution.  

• Geofences: to create route points (stops) and control their visiting;
• Tracks: to analyze how unit movements and deviations from routes; 
• Reports: to control mileage and passenger flow.

The client manually checked the data on route performance from the monitoring system against the actual schedule.

This solution satisfied everyone and proved to be working. Telematics showed how expectations differed from reality and set the stage for a specialized solution.

How it looks in NimBus

Christine knows that there’s another way to solve the task – a simpler and a more convenient one. That’s why she promotes NimBus in her native city. And that’s how it looks like in the first phase.  

Geofences are substituted by Stops with the option to indicate the type of transport running there. The process of route point creation itself has become simpler:

• Geofences in Wialon: click on the tab – create new – click on the map – turn to Geofences panel – configuration. 
• Stops in NimBus: click on the map – select type – specify name and description below.

In NimBus, geofence groups become fully-functional routes. That way, a dispatcher gets the sequence of stops with a schedule and assigned buses. Everything on a single tab. Considering that the route is generated automatically on the map and edited by drag-and-drop, NimBus quickly substituted the man who drew the routes manually on the map (yes, there was one).

There’s also another way to control unit movements. Instead of tracks on the map and reports on geofence visiting, a dispatcher has online monitoring tools. 

• The linear scheme shows if the driver keeps to the schedule: delays and advances are displayed right under the bus icon.
• Notifications inform if the driver didn’t start the ride as per schedule, got off the route or skipped a stop.  

The client uses Wialon and NimBus to report on ride performance, mileage, and passenger flow. 

Half a year ago, the client controlled nothing of the described above, and today they use solutions by Gurtam to control 120+ buses. With that, “M2M Telematics Siberia” helps to develop the solutions with feedback and insights from the client’s dispatchers. 

A simple solution for an interesting project. I bet you have something like this. Contact us at marketing@gurtam.com and tell us about your projects.

Images source: nws.su