Seeking Solution to Enhance Delivery of Public Buses and Chartered and Ad-hoc Transport Services

SMRT operates public buses and provides chartered and adhoc transport services to clients.

Public bus services

With limited number of buses, service controllers would need to determine which bus service to allocate the resources such that it would reap the most benefit (improve Excess Wait Time).

Chartered services

As part of the service, we currently:

• track vehicle punctuality manually (for certain vehicles)
• make decisions to handle operational deviations (late/missed trips) manually, and
• use off-the-shelf means e.g. WhatsApp to manage last minute service activations

The above methods are not optimal and therefore need further improvement to increase operational efficiency and improve our service level.

We would like to implement a solution that can

• detect vehicle punctuality in real-time
• predict the likelihood of late/missed trips for our own buses and subcontractor buses and propose the solution to alleviate the late/missed trips (e.g. utilise big data and Artificial Intelligence)
• manage the last-minute activations of various fleet resources (i.e. ensure replacement drivers know who to pick up and where to go to)

The proposed solution should help us to achieve higher service reliability to strengthen branding and track record.

It should also improve workforce productivity by enabling our service controllers to increase their capacity to manage more services at one time.