TOP 10 IT IMPLEMENTATIONS OF THE YEAR

Continued from page: 7

Thursday, June 10, 2004

AVTS: Delhi Transport Corporation

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Project Head: Deepak Sharma, Dy CGM (IT, Tr and Pub) Location: Delhi

In Delhi, its local bus-transport service, DTC, is using DGPS (Differential GPS), GIS and trunk radio sets to keep track of its fleet in real time. Currently, AVTS (Automatic Vehicle Tracking System) is in its pilot stage, being implemented in 200 buses.  

Anyone who has traveled in a DTC bus knows that the buses often do not show up on time and do not stop at designated bus stops, while the drivers are notorious for over speeding. From the commuters' point of view, AVTS, which will tell the control room the location of each bus and create a live communications channel between the driver and the control room, attempts to address these problems. From DTC's perspective, it will allow for better bus scheduling and a quick replacement in case of a breakdown or accident.  

Each bus is fitted with a VMU (Vehicle Monitoring Unit), which calculates the position of the bus through DGPS and communicates it to the control room over UHF. It has a small display, a processing unit, a set of 14 easily identifiable icons (such as fire and injured driver) and a numeric keypad, which the driver can use to send 99 more messages. A list of these combinations is available in each bus and the drivers are trained to use the VMU. AVTS is using DGPS and not GPS because the former is more accurate. At the control room's end are a database server, communications server, application client and a display system (with GIS interface). The person at the control center can send and receive messages to and from the drivers, see the real-time movement of the buses on the GIS map and replay any previous route of a bus. It can also generate reports on fleet utilization, kilometers traveled, fuel consumption (bus and depot wise) and driver- wise performance. For example, DTC can take corrective action if it discovers that it is losing revenue as a bus is consuming more fuel because it is taking a circuitous route.The system uses a GIS map of Delhi that shows DTC stops, bus depots, the routes to two depots (the pilot covers only two of DTC's 33 depots) and other landmarks such as hospitals and fire stations. In fact, the biggest issue that DTC faced was getting the GIS map of Delhi; it took them a year to develop it.  

The Rs 4 crore project has been worked upon by DTC (Government of Delhi) and the Department of IT (Government of India) and the implementation has been done by CMC. The system runs on Sun Solaris and Win NT, with Oracle as the RDBMS and VB at the frontend. The operations team includes supervisors, conductors and foremen.  

Where does the project go from here? DTC plans to extend it to the vehicles of other government departments, such as the fire and police departments.  

The bottom line: The project will make commuting easier for DTC's daily commuters and make DTC save money by streamlining its processes.  

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