Simplifying Complexity At its core, cloud computing replaces traditional on-premises servers and infrastructure with hosted, remote systems. But for a transit agency, that simplification carries enormous operational advantages.“ Most customers do have some idea of what it is and how it operates, but don’ t really understand what the benefits are to them,” said Brian Farabaugh, Avail’ s Director of Technology.“ They used to have servers at their internal IT departments, but many customers don’ t even have internal IT. They have contracted ones that come over once or twice a week. Now, those issues are directly handled by us.”“ We save them time and energy on maintaining those systems,” he continued.“ If you need to expand your database, you don’ t need to go out and buy new servers or more storage. We can now do that dynamically.” Avail’ s technology provides transit agencies with a single database for data to flow seamlessly throughout the organization. Business intelligence dashboards report metrics in real time to help improve efficiency, justify funding requests, and demonstrate compliance. Riders are immediately notified of changes, dispatchers know the locations of every bus and driver, incidents are tracked as they occur, and vehicle health monitoring capabilities can predict failures so maintenance can easily work on all vehicle issues before those buses hit the road.
Raw Data into Actionable Insight Transit vehicles generate staggering amounts of telematics data, but many agencies lack the resources or expertise to harness it effectively. Cloud infrastructure enables not only collection but also centralized interpretation and deployment of this data for operations, maintenance, and planning.
“ One of the things that Avail prides their Enterprise Transit Management Software( ETMS) platform on is they like to provide answers, not just data,” Farabaugh said.“ We have dashboards that show agencies,‘ Hey, this is the data that’ s coming in, this is what it means.’” The ETMS system provides role-based user interfaces for operations, finance, and administration staff to manage all aspects of a modern transit agency operation. Capabilities include automatic mining and analysis of operational data, configurable performance metrics dashboards, preemptive notification of upcoming issues, as well as onboard, desktop, email and text alerts to avoid operational issues.“ We’ re beginning to integrate AI into our product with the help of our partners,” Farabaugh said.“ If we see consistent patterns in your running times, maybe it’ s time for a suggestion to change your schedule. We also do a lot of vehicle health monitoring, predictive maintenance. You’ re getting amber lamp indicators? We tell you what that trouble code means. You decide whether to bring that bus in or keep it out.”“ Enhanced predictive maintenance is a major area of development,” said John Roth, Staff Engineer at Avail.“ With the integration to other systems, we’ re enhancing Avail 360 API interfaces for real-time streaming data. These weren’ t previously possible with an on-site system.”
Supporting Every User But even with strong data tools in place, agency staff can feel overwhelmed by the influx of information. That’ s why Avail developed the Follow-on Adoption Services and Training— FAST ™ Team— to provide continuous coaching and contextual understanding.
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