Modern transport systems are managed with operational data such as vehicle positions, delays or traffic jams. Processing, storing and analysing such data is largely the same everywhere, yet each transport system tends to have its own tool. And the data should benefit not only those who run the system, but also the people who travel.
Interest in public transport goes back to student projects on comparing train connections, interactive train diagrams and public transport maps 123, the last of them built on Geovisto 45. One of our goals has since been a universal methodology for processing and storing operational data, independent of the structure of a given system. Its first result was a data model based on the GTFS standard, used to analyse delays of Brno public transport in cooperation with data.Brno 678. Because it keeps the relationships within the system, delays can be followed even over long periods of time, as the figures below show.
The analysis tool grew into Lissy, the backbone of our public transport research. It applies the same approach to the whole South Moravian integrated transport system: it continuously processes real-time data on vehicles and their delays from the API of KORDIS JMK, the organizer of the system, keeps their history and makes them available through its own API. Other applications build on it, from the trip planners described below to theses on exploring relationships within the regional network, predicting delays and searching connections with them in mind, and integrating data from further sources 9101112.
Travellers also need to know where exactly a line goes. In cooperation with KORDIS JMK we created LineShaper, which automatically generates geographically accurate routes of all lines in the South Moravian region 13 and copes with the many variants of individual lines, as the figures below show.
Road traffic is a different story. Waze shares data with cities around the world: they report planned constructions, closures and events, and in return receive traffic alerts and jams. Brno publishes these data on data.Brno, and analysing them shows how alerts and closures affect traffic in the city 141516. This is the basis of Analyticity, a tool that helps traffic engineers understand the effect of road closures and plan restrictions. Theses have extended it with data from more sources and municipalities and a friendlier interface 171819, and with simulations and routing that show how a closure redistributes the traffic 2021. Other theses monitor traffic and open data in real time on the RIoT platform 2223, look at traffic accidents and where they happen 242526, traffic events and signs in the City of Most 2728 or disruptions of air traffic 29.
Cycling needs data of its own. The intensity of cycling traffic in Brno has been modelled and visualized 3031, and we proposed a spatial algorithm that integrates cycling datasets from different sources 32. Further theses track and share the location of cyclists and analyse bike sharing in Brno 3334.
For travellers, trip planners combine several modes of transport. They take public transport data from the Lissy API and plan routes with OpenTripPlanner 2, a community-developed open-source routing engine. This way they offer park-and-ride in Carpub 35, walking in Walk and Ride 36, bikes in Routio 37, cycling trips 38 and multimodal planning for Brno and the whole region 39. Vlakograf draws train timetables as train graphs 40 and PubEval evaluates the quality of public transport networks. Several of these theses were awarded at Excel@FIT 30143539.
