In our last webinar, we shared with you, some key aspects of what it means for urban bus companies to get access to key data on passenger behavior while they board any city bus. 

There are many other commercial applications that are mainly focussed on video surveillance and vehicle control which will not touch today due to this is not part of our value proposal. 

On the other side, we would like to emphasize that the advancement of new technologies in big data, Artificial Intelligence (AI), machine learning, deep learning, and internet of things (IoT) is shaping the future of Smart Cities.

Geoinformation and communication technology is another emerging field which is increasingly being utilized to foster urban sustainability. Flame Analytics technology represents another layer on this big map.

Flame Analytics cloud Platform relies on state-of-the-art technologies. It extracts data from an Internet of Things infrastructures based on standard sensors such as video cameras, people counters, beacons and Wi-Fi access points. Flame is a hardware agnostic cloud application that helps clients to understand their customer behaviour and drive revenue through real time insights. All this Big data is converted into valuable information ready to be consumed. 

Information on physical spaces movement flows or heat maps, traffic metrics, dwell times, loyalty ratios and much more information that is used to take improvement actions and also to deliver messages under certain marketing campaigns rules or even at operations level, depend on each case. 
Although this does not have very much in common with transportation we believe that it will give you a better idea of Flame capabilities.

Basically, our technology follows a quite simple flow. Flame collects raw data from different data sources (location services, hardware, software tools, etc.) that we transform, in many cases using Artificial Intelligent, into insights ready to be activated. We have different forms of activation either in marketing or in the operations field. 

Activation is key to generate good value to the customers.

All this Big data is converted into valuable information ready to be consumed. 

Transport Analytics – data sources & benefits

But… How efficient could be using Big data Analytics for improved Public transport?

Among the main sources of data are devices like 3D cameras and WiFi tracking devices. 

Obviously hardware elements need to be installed in each bus vehicle that have to be tracked. 

The reason for using this type of technology is mainly because it allows Transport companies to better understand how passengers behave in a city environment. 

Through data analytics it’s possible to improve vehicle performance and to establish strategies for optimizing routes and times, which are aimed to better serve transport demands.

Benefits Transport Analytics

There are two types of passengers KPIs that can be obtained, namely Presence and Affluence. 

Presence data is collected by tracking WiFi signal from mobile devices. This allow Flame to identify unique passengers. 

Affluence is a different set of data. It counts every passenger that boards or leaves the bus on each stop. 

Using a wide range of high-precision sensors it is possible to detect and count bus passengers while respecting privacy. No pictures are taken and no face recognition techniques are employed. 
The high-precision 3D sensors are key to calculate real time busoccupancy, which is presented also on Flame Affluence dashboard coupled with Presence Analytics. By keeping track of the bus occupancy level, the transport Company is able to analyze real time service performance.

General scheme of Transport Analytics Solution

nformation of fare transactions data and transport titles validations is collected from the machines installed on the vehicles, then sent to the transport Company operation application and, when validated, it is collected at the Flame Platform. 

Smartphone WiFi signals, more precisely ‘probe requests’ are also collected and sent to Flame cloud platform. 

GPS tracking are  one of the features of the WiFi devices that were installed on the buses. They send the latitude and longitude coordinates to determine position.

Real time vehicle occupation combining passengers in and out flow is captured by the 3D sensor. This data is sent from every bus stop to Flame cloud platform. 

The WiFi Tracking, GPS signal, Transactions volumes, and bus Occupation data are processed altogether by Flame, using AI algorithms to determine travellers boarding and to present origin-destination matrices on a given period of time.

See all the features in our WHITEPAPER