2. 2
Public transport is the backbone of any dynamic
city. It keeps thousands of people moving and the
city running. Disruptions can have far-reaching
consequences if not tackled quickly. Now more
than ever, the most critical planning decisions
happen in the moment. Are you keeping up?
If one disruption causes a chain reaction that
affects the rest of your plan – from crew and
vehicle/rolling stock allocation to delayed
departures, it might be because you’re not
equipped to respond fast enough.
Blink and disruptions
will multiply
If disruptions are
delaying your
passengers, it
might be because
your response is
too slow.
3. 3
Power planning
Public transport operations – and the decisions
that keep buses and trains moving – are now driven
by big data – a real-time stream of structured and
unstructured data. Decision-makers have at their
fingertips the information that could enable them
to make far better decisions. But data alone won’t
keep your fleet running on time. It’s what you do
with the data that counts.
In this guide, you’ll discover how to access the full
potential of big data to make decisions when it
matters most – in real time. Also inside, find out
who the new decisions-makers are, and how you
can empower them to keep your service levels
up, increase public confidence, and grow your
business.
Data isn’t worth a thing, no matter its scale,
when you can’t determine how best to act on it
within the window of opportunity.
4. 4
When leaders put control into the
hands of their people, at all levels, they
unlock incalculable potential.”
– Dennis Bakke, author of The Decision Maker (2013),
co-founder and former CEO of AES,
and CEO of Imagine Schools
The new
decision-makers
Who in your organization would you describe as a
‘decision-maker’? A small group of men and women
in suits may come to mind. But there are no suits
at the control center when a rush hour breakdown
jams up the busiest road and causes a backlog of
passengers to clear.
Many transport operators suffer from a significant
disconnect between strategy and operations:
Ineffective communication between the executive suite
and the control center. When asked what constitutes
a good decision, those responsible for execution
typically apply criteria far removed from the business
goals or key performance indicators (KPIs) defined
during the long-term planning process.
In other words, the decisions made about your
operations in the moment – when many of the most
critical decisions have to be made – may not drive your
business in the direction you intended. Those which do,
perhaps only by chance.
The definition of ‘decision-maker’ is by necessity
becoming broader, more democratic. Decisions have to
be made 24 hours a day, seven days a week by people
across operations and pay grades. Technology is driving
the demand for rapid responses, and enabling those
responses to have immediate effect. Public transport
operators that embrace this new definition – and the
sense of shared responsibility it entails – are embracing
technology to raise service levels and competitive edge.
5. 5
A single, centralized system that is able to quickly
analyze unexpected situations and explore the
thousands of possible options is able to offer the best
solution promptly. This empowers everyone with access
to this information – even outside the control center –
to see the impact of their decisions.
The BIG impact of
small decisions
6. Let’s take the example of John the
bus driver, and the decisions he
has to weigh when he encounters
another bus that has broken down.
Both buses serve the same route to
the airport at 30-minute intervals.
Leaves the
passengers to wait
for the next bus.
The passengers are now
one hour behind schedule.
With the additional load, the
third bus is flouting the law as
it exceeds its passenger limit.
Half the passengers of
the earlier bus miss their
flights.
The bus company
needs to reimburse
the passengers for
their bus tickets.
More time is added to
John’s route as he has
those extra passengers to
drop off along the way.
He misses the cut-off
time before several
roads in the city are
closed for a marathon.
John needs to take a
longer route to the airport.
The bus reaches the
airport half an hour late.
Picks up all
passengers of the
bus that broke down.
Meets up with the other
bus at an overlapping
stop and transfers
the delayed airport
passengers to that bus.
The delayed airport
passengers get off at the
high-speed rail station
and take the airport
express.
They catch up on lost time
and everyone makes it for
their flights.
John is behind schedule
for only 10 minutes. He is
still in time to avoid the
road closure.
John arrives at the airport
with a slight delay. None
of his own passengers
misses their flight.
If John has a complete view
of the routes and changes on
day of operations (e.g. the road
closure and its effect on travel
time), he would be able to see:
The BIG impact of small decisions
The third bus’ estimated arrival time at the
airport, and the delay to passengers if he
makes Decision A.
When roads are closed for the marathon
and the impact of Decision B.
There’s a bus nearby that will be passing the
station of the high-speed rail to the airport.
This leads to a third decision option – one
that has the least negative impact on time,
customer satisfaction, and costs.
The passengers are
stressed with the
mad rush.
Three passengers
miss their flights.
A
B
$$
7. 7
The cost of
not knowing
When your decision-makers are presented with new
information at the moment of execution – whether
that’s a potential opportunity to profit, cut costs, or
a disruption – do they know how best to respond?
Under pressure to make rapid decisions, faced with an
overwhelming volume of data, they have no choice but
to rely on instinct and rules of thumb. There is simply
no way to assess the merits of the countless plausible
options and outcomes in time. But snap decisions aren’t
always good decisions, because the most profitable
choice often isn’t the most obvious.
Not addressing disruptions immediately could
cause far-reaching consequences that cripple
operations, affect customer confidence, and cause
financial losses.
You can empower everyone in your organization to
make the right decisions by giving them access to
insights into the past, present and future, and the
ability to re-plan and re-optimize as needed. The key
word is insight, rather than information. And those
insights must be available in real time to be of real use.
8. 8
Why your workforce and fleet
scheduling system isn’t empowering
your decision-makers
A workforce and fleet scheduling system delivers
the bad news but was never intended to function
as a real-time, decision-support tool. It’s great
at informing planners when something didn’t go
according to plan. It provides little help in responding
intelligently to changing circumstances.
If you want to know what’s happening right now,
you probably have some sort of a fleet management
system that is more or less real-time – the very recent
past, and perhaps what’s going to happen before the
end of the shift. But when you go a little further into
the future, suddenly you have all these choices. And
more choices. Very quickly, you’re looking at an infinite
number of possible futures.
The problem is, the outcome of these futures isn’t
equal. In some cases, you’ll run late with a disruption
that causes a domino effect. And in other cases, you’ll
manage or exceed expectations of your demanding
passengers. With an infinite number of possibilities,
under pressure of time, how can your planners know
they’ve made the best decision for your passengers
and business?
9. 9
Seeing isn’t solving
Visibility tells you what’s happening in the present.
This can be helpful, but it certainly isn’t enough.
What’s needed is ‘targeted visibility’ i.e. decision
support. Intelligent decision support constantly
calculates the impact of decisions, thereby enabling
planners to respond in the best possible way: Now
this has happened, your best response is to do this
and then this. And so on. Planners can use decision
support in two ways: To determine how to respond to
changed circumstances, and to see the impact of the
decisions they consider making.
The capabilities of legacy system
vs real-time planning
Tracks and manages the activities
of your fleet and crew in real time.
Tracks data.
Provides real-time alerts of any disruptions
and offers suggestions to resolve them.
Provides immediate access
to accurate information.
Calculates the effects of delays and unexpected
events, and shows you the consequences of
implementing any particular action.
Informs you when something failed
to go according to plan.
Real-time planning systemLegacy system
10. 10
To make significant
improvement on KPIs,
you need optimization
Typical business intelligence tools can provide useful
insights, but those insights don’t help decision-makers
to make significant improvements on key performance
indicators. For that, you need optimization.
Optimization is the process of ‘big calculations’
– the data crunching needed to extract valuable
insights from big data. The best results are achieved
by intelligently combining the most appropriate
algorithms, depending on the type of problems to
be solved. In this way, optimization delivers reliable
predictions and recommendations that optimize your
key performance indicators.
Read on to discover the three capabilities that must
work in combination with optimization to set the
successful opportunist apart from the rest.
11. 11
Three critical real-time
planning capabilities
Control
Automation has its place. But you need to know when
to automate and when to optimize with the input of
a decision-maker. No system can fully account for
those unexpected but lucrative opportunities. And
the value of the soft knowledge of your people on the
ground cannot be overstated. It’s about interactive
automated planning. Planners need to interact with
the system – working with it rather than for it – to step
in and improve on an automated plan based on soft
knowledge, gained from experience and familiarity with
the situation on the ground.
For example, if a train driver has an emergency family
matter to attend to and can’t make it for his shift one
hour away, the system may find three possible drivers,
and suggest the one living closest to the depot. But
even if that driver is at home and drops everything to
come to work, there is still the possibility that service
will be delayed, not to mention other trains need to be
rescheduled to account for track availability.
What the system doesn’t know but a service planner
does, is that a driver who has taken the day off to
clear his leave stays just around the corner and
would most probably agree to come in as he has
nothing arranged for that day. Service planners who
are in control and possess the soft knowledge can
make better decisions.
Effective real-time planning isn’t about pushing
a magic button and hoping for the best. It’s
about creating the plans that cause the least
inconvenience and delay to passengers, and
causes the least impact to costs – by combining a
knowledgeable planner with a practical, service and
business-focused approach to optimization, always
with the ultimate goal of optimizing the public
transport planning.
12. 12
Speed
Re-optimizing an entire plan on the day of execution
causes more problems than it solves, typically
rendering the plan unusable. Effective real-time
planning balances the time taken to optimize a plan
with the quality of the solution – getting that balance
right is critical.
For example, if a train on a low demand route breaks
down during off-peak time, it’s better to send in
emergency buses to ferry passengers of that line
to their destinations than to re-optimize all trains
and revise schedules, which would affect more
passengers. Besides that, planning would be more
complex as the revised schedule would need to take
into account other connecting services, e.g. feeder
buses that have been planned to minimize waiting
time for arriving train passengers to continue to their
next destination.
Dynamic real-time planning relies on the ability to
optimize plans selectively. Planners can focus the
power of real-time planning technology on urgent,
business-critical planning decisions, allowing
them to react swiftly to, and minimize the impact of
unexpected events.
13. 13
Accuracy
Having the right technology that supports real-time
decisions allows planners to invest their time in
making planning decisions rather than modifying steps,
calculating and recalculating values, interpreting data
to make deductions – they can step back and see the
bigger picture: How planning decisions impact KPIs.
Planners can receive instant feedback on the quality
of their decisions. This reduces the risk of making
error, making planning and optimization solutions
more robust and reducing the need for double and
triple checking when changes are made.
It’s critical that your technology has the intelligence
and speed to cope with this degree of change. When
planners change one piece of data, all other dependent
variables must automatically be recalculated to reflect
that change, providing calculations and deductions
in real time, in response to events and planning
decisions. This goes far beyond the speed and capacity
of a human planner.
The same applies when external information changes.
For example, when emergency roadwork is carried
out, forcing a main road to be closed, and affecting
numerous high demand bus routes. Or a major
accident causes a massive traffic jam, delaying not only
buses that ply that road, but other buses too as traffic
is backed up, causing the gridlock to spill to other
areas as motorists look for alternative routes.
14. 14
Your competitive edge
in real-time planning
– immediate response
with on-the-go
workforce planning
An intelligent planning system that comes with a
mobile application can help you keep your service
levels up, especially when you’re hit with disruptions
that require last-minute changes. Let’s say a driver
calls in sick and your planner is not in the office,
the plan can still be adjusted so that your bus or
train leaves on time.
Mobile support in planning puts your planners in
full control, wherever they are. They will be alerted
quickly of any problems. Without wasting time going
back to the office, your planners can revise the plan
on the spot.
Through the mobile application, planners can quickly
access up-to-date information with full visibility of who
will be available at any particular time. They can see a
list of available staff with the right skills, and solve any
problem without further delay. The mobile application
will also provide immediate feedback on how the
revised plan impacts operations and staff availability.
This mobility enables the real-time advantage that
can transform your business. It gives planners not
just visibility but insight, allowing them to improve
plans and make more informed decisions in line with
the company’s business goals.
15. 15
Real-time
advantage is your
business advantage.
Are you ready for it?
The free-flow of information along the chain has
created opportunities to respond to unexpected
disruptions on a scale that has never been seen before.
What-if scenarios allow your planners to anticipate
the consequences of an action or revised plan, helping
them make the right call to minimize inconvenience
to passengers directly affected by the disruption, or
indirectly affected because of the measures taken to
address the immediate problem. Real-time visibility
offers solutions that cause the least impact to the rest
of the fleet. The end result: Happier, better served
passengers, a more efficient city and greater mobility
for all in the long run.
16. We’re excited about keeping cities moving as they
grow, and getting more people out of their cars and
onto public transport. To do this, public transport
needs to be reliable and effective – no matter how
often or how serious the disruption. Disruptions
happen in real time. You need to react in real time too.
Quintiq can assist you with decision-making support
to return service quickly to normal and protect the
business’ bottom line.
Talk to us
Contact Quintiq
