Agile Analytics Helps Improve the Quality of the Bus Service in NSW
Agile Analytics helped convert massive amounts of data from NSW’s buses into actionable insights to improve the bus service performance.
Where to Begin? Departure from the Depot
Transport for NSW is a data-rich organisation: collecting data from every bus, ferry, light and heavy rail, & metro in New South Wales in real-time. Prior to the project, the Bus Contract Management team was unable to process, synthesise, and get real value from all the bus data. It was very difficult and time-consuming to get insights from the old system in an automated, interactive and timely manner – so Agile Analytics was contacted to “plug” the potholes regarding their big data platform, Power BI skills, and other data analytics requirements.
On the Road
TfNSW had ambitious plans to improve the customer experience of the bus service but needed Agile Analytics to help process all their data and visualise it with interactive dashboards in order to get real value based on evidence and insights.
Firstly, the phase or maturity of their initial data analytics process and systems were analysed then the Agile Analytics and TfNSW teams worked together to develop project requirements and goals – bearing in mind ultimate goals to improve the quality of performance of the bus service for customers. This is where business and technology come together to reach organisational goals. The main goals were to uncover where issues lay and be able to hone in on exactly which aspect of the bus service was causing the problem, for example, which particular locations or roads cause delays that may affect certain routes and other busses.
With the establishment of a roadmap, a self-managed and fully automated solution was built on the cloud. The system first aggregates data from tracking devices on the buses, then loads it into a Data Lake, the data is then cleaned, organised, and finally transferred into a Data Warehouse and an in-memory analytical data model which is refreshed every few minutes.
We built a number of dashboards for monitoring bus trips, schedule times, locations of scheduled and unscheduled stops, comparing scheduled depot departure time versus actual departure time, analysing how such late/early departures from depots or bus stops interfere with other stops on the same route, and ultimately understanding reasons for delays to help managers get a better understanding of the problems to provide better quality of service to the passengers. These dashboards help visualise data in real-time for the communication of key information to managers, bus operators, and other employees.
“We get data from every bus every 5 seconds – that’s a lot of data which initially the Contract Management team was not able to process, to synthesise, and get real value. What we have done is to actually give them that value so that they can get some real insights.”
Outcomes
- All data has been integrated on one model with live connection; no more crossing systems to connect to data from various source
- The Bus Contract Management team and Bus Operators can now have meaningful conversations based on shareable data insights that are available on a user-friendly and interactive platform
- Bus operators and managers are able to view the dashboards to analyse their own performance and against set benchmark
- Data insights are now available on a user friendly and interactive platform for all staff and bus operators
Fully Built on Azure
Azure Data Lake
Azure Data Warehouse
Azure SQL DB
Azure Analysis Services
Azure Data Factory
Power BI
