tools and technologies for smart city development - responses

Optimizing Public Transport Schedules to Minimize Energy Use and Wait Times Public transport system plays an important role in any city to travel through it seamlessly with reduced individual effort and it also improves several other factors like congestion and the environment. The authorities of the public transport company must strive to improve policymaking by using tools to attain effective utilization of energy while increasing their capabilities of serving more individuals. E-participation is one of the categories that can be used to collect feedback and improve the schedules by simply enabling a click of the button for a more suitable schedule by everyone. For instance, by enabling a new option to “choose my schedule” can be included in the already existing “Ventra App” in Chicago to group the individuals and have a definitive schedule that would serve the maximum people and eliminating the less effective schedules thereby minimizing energy use. Coming to the passenger wait times, again e-participation can be an effective tool wherein an app that runs on web 2.0 and is build using android/ iOS can be used to record the arrivals of the passengers and align the schedules. Also, the opinion mining tools like RapidMiner can be used to collect the opinions of the users and classify them based on their intents/ opinions on the currents timings and then modifying the policies to reduce the wait times. These tools can collect data from all the variety of sources and then use machine learning approaches to derive an optimized schedule that improves the efficiency and thereby reducing the wait times.