Going beyond automatic vehicle location
DPS Integrated Student Transportation Management System (ISTMS)
Detroit Public Schools is a large urban school district with an enrollment of more than 150,000 students. DPS has a large school bus fleet, including over 500 school buses and 300 other support service fleet vehicles. The Detroit Public School's Office of Student Transportation is the first in the nation to implement a comprehensive school transportation fleet management system using integrated AVL with the clearly defined goal of achieving safe, efficient and timely delivery of student transportation services. This approach to solving school transportation operations performance problems through integration of mission critical information is first of its kind.
DPS-ISTMS is an advanced and comprehensive student transportation management system that aims beyond automatic vehicle locating and at improving student transportation performance in terms of three key criteria, SAFE, EFFICIENT, and TIMELY. The system architecture of DPS-ISTMS consists of seven components
DPS-ISTMS builds on GPS/AVL, integrates with GIS routing capability and constructs a district-wide geo-database that connects with the legacy student information databases for efficient and effective bus routing and scheduling. The development of DPS-ISTMS is guided by a project management team (PMT), which includes the Office of Student Transportation executive director; DPS-GIS specialist, Eastern Michigan University GIS researchers, and a communications specialist. In addition, professional staff in the offices that have linkages with student transportation, such as the DPS IT Department, DPS Student Information System, and various departments having fleet applications including Public Safety, Central Distribution, Site Management, Facilities, and Food Service are involved.
DPS-ISTMS is an advanced and comprehensive student transportation management system that aims beyond automatic vehicle locating and at improving student transportation performance in terms of three key criteria, SAFE, EFFICIENT, and TIMELY. The system architecture of DPS-ISTMS consists of seven components (or subsystems): a Student Transportation Management Protocol, an AVL, a Geo-Student Database, a Bus Route Scheduler, a Transportation Performance Analyst, a Database Maintainer, and a Technical Assistant (Figure 1, the right panel). Each component performs a specific role in student transportation analysis and management, which will be further analyzed in the following sections based on the ISTMS developed for Detroit Public Schools.
Student Transportation Management Protocols and Technical Assistant
In the process of developing DPS-ISTMS, the interfaces, procedures and protocols of operating the system, retrieving, achieving and updating the student data, synchronizing with the addresses and street networks, deriving bus stops, runs and routes, and conducting performance analyses are to be standardized. The standards are documented. Plans of training and technical support are also developed to secure smooth start-up, operation and maintenance of DPS-ISTMS.
Geo-Student Database
There are two sets of databases that are involved in student transportation management. The first set contains information on school buildings and students, such as, student enrollment data (SED), school programs and buildings data (SPBD), and student home address data (SHAD). These data are analyzed to determine transportation, eligibility, ridership, bus stops and bus runs. The other dataset is geographic data, including street networks data (SND), and school boundaries. Only when the two sets of data are integrated can GIS routing functions be used to optimize bus routes and to make bus schedules (Figure 1). In the terminology of GIS, the non-spatial data (students and school buildings) are often managed in large commercialized relational database management systems like Oracle, IBM DB2, AS/400, etc, which can be used to derive geographic data such as bus stops and bus runs. The geographic data (street networks and school boundaries) are managed through GIS software packages. The integrated data model for the non-spatial and the geographic data is called geodatabase. ArcSDE is the ESRI primary toolbox to build such a gateway between GIS and comprehensive commercialized relational database management systems (RDBMS). In a geodatabase, geographic data are stored and managed in a RDBMS as tables with geometry columns, and software that works on standard RDBMS data can be used to implement GIS behavior. With the merging of student data and geographic data into the geodatabase, DPS-ISTMS enables a seamless integration between GIS and student information databases for efficiently performing tasks of bus routing and scheduling.