Calculating the most efficient route on public transportation
Amesto NextBridge has worked with Telenor to find ways to use mobility analytics to help commuters plan the best travel routes with the shortest wait times in public transit in Oslo.
Waiting for public transport is frustrating but it is a part of our everyday lives. Commuters wait an average of 5 minutes per trip which can add up to a lot of time wasted. Public transportation companies have some information as to which routes are the most efficient but are unable to transfer the data into a comprehensible map and communicate this information to travelers.
As part of the SAS® Viya® Hackathon, a team from Amesto Nextbridge partnered with telecommunications company Telenor to find a way to “leverage mobility analytics for a better customer experience” as expressed by Hans De Wit, Senior Data Scientist from Telenor.
The project began by using cell phone tower data to track where a commuter connected, in order to create a heat map that can identify a possible travel route through Oslo, the busy capital city of Norway.
The project calculated which routes in Oslo were the best based on time, total distance, number of stops, and detours from the fastest route. Using Open Cell ID and Open Map, the team members were able to calculate a commuter’s travel time and route. They did this by comparing the distance, how many bus changes, bus stops and detours to the most direct route.
Making sense of messy transport data
We wanted to solve some of the problems related to commuting and public transport by combining open source tools with SAS® Viya®. The raw data is messy and hard to understand. So, our team made a visual diagram to show four potential routes. We ranked them best to worst based on the different factors. Inge Grinni CEO Amesto Nextbridge
The resulting solution is called MapTrends. If adopted into use, it can help communities and municipalities all around Norway predict the best travel routes and help ensure less waiting time for commuters. Transportation companies can see where their services are failing based on the amount of time the average commuter takes to get from point A to B.
Challenge
- Customers have long wait times and are not able to see the best possible travel routes.
Solution
- MapTrends, using data from cell towers to calculate travel routes and offer the best routes based on time, distance, stops, and detours.
Benefit
- Customers will be able to tell which route will get them to their destination with the least amount of wait time.
- Travel companies will understand which routes are most used and how to improve time efficiency based on user data.
About Hack In SAS Viya
In association with Intel and SAS Nordic User Group “Fans”. SAS hosted the competition “Smarter Together” for SAS partners. Here, teams of analysts and data scientists demonstrate the value of open data combined with SAS® Viya® in the cloud and open source technologies.
SAS provided the SAS® Viya® platform with a number of SAS tools in the cloud for easy access through saasnow.com. The nine participating teams built showcase based on a number of SAS software products including: Visual Analytics, Visual Statistics, Visual Data Mining & Machine learning, econometrics, and optimization.