Route management system

Riga International Bus Terminal has been one of the most important public transport hubs in the Baltics for decades. Thousands of people and dozens of buses stop here every day. However, so that the traffic is always accurate and everyone involved has the most up-to-date information about routes, a set of complex processes work behind the scenes of the bus terminal.

Over the years, the existing route management system had become obsolete. Not only was it incompatible with today’s IT technology, it also relied on an extremely large amount of manual work, opening up the possibility of human error. The employees of the bus terminal handled a large part of the information in an unstructured way – through e-mail, paper printouts or phone calls.

Additional challenges were brought by the implementation of the Rail Baltica project, foreseeing the reduction of the bus terminal territory, thus setting an even higher bar for the efficiency and accuracy of route management.

In 2020, the LMT team started the development of a new route management system. Its first step was a nuanced study of the existing processes, which made it possible to understand the shortcomings and design a system that would not only be able to fully utilize the opportunities provided by the latest IT technologies, but would also work in the long term.

The new system has been able to automate and modernize several processes of the bus terminal, making the daily life of both passengers and employees of the bus terminal easier. Now all current information from the Road Transport Directorate and carriers is automatically processed by the system. A traffic controller does not have to deal with manual paperwork, emails and phone calls.

Also, thanks to artificial intelligence and computer vision, all buses on the territory of the bus terminal are recognized and registered automatically. Passengers are notified of the latest info with the help of Tilde language synthesis, and the information is displayed on the screens, as the system automatically reacts to the respective events.

Finally, the new system will be easy to update in the future as well, because it is built in a modular way – each of its blocks can be separated and modernized without affecting the rest of the system. The project was implemented in less than a year in accordance with the customer’s requirements and within the expected deadline. We used the Agile Scrum methodology, which quickly allowed us to review and coordinate work assignments.