Challenges--Tackling the problems and inefficiencies of manually operated bus services.

"Improving public transport is integral to smart city success. It is costly, but transferring passengers at attractive prices enables education, employment, and ultimately safe movement," advocates SCADL CEO, Rakesh Shankar.

Ahmedabad's two major bus services Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) and city bus AMTS operate 1,000 buses transporting 0.8 million passengers daily across the city. Despite attractive ticket prices, the bus services were underutilized due to customer concerns over quality. The previous manually operated system suffered from poor route planning, a lack of advertised bus schedules, bus-bunching, excessive waiting time, rough driving, stop skipping, and inconvenient or inconsistent cash collection. A lack of transparency also resulted in higher operating costs and customer complaint handling.

The city authorities were keen to upgrade to a cashless, software-based bus service system backed by advanced ICT to help reduce expenses and problem-response time.

"Smart transportation must offer ease of use for the traveler, transparency of services, and the ability to plan. We needed to understand entire routes and behavior, so we could deploy the right resources, add new vehicles and develop seamless transport services."

"The comprehensive system offers the operator a plan-do-check-action optimization cycle that not only executes specified plans but also evaluates those plans by visualizing operation performance. Real-time visualization of running buses and fare revenue enables operators to easily detect irregularities and swiftly determine countermeasures," explains Fujii.

Incident management systems also enable operators to track incidents such as equipment failure and bus accidents throughout the incident lifecycle.

Results--Ahmedabad ITMS success, a template for successive smart cities.

Launched in 2017, the intelligent transport management system is already helping develop efficient and convenient bus transport services, and transform Ahmedabad into a world-class smart city.

"This software-based system enables us to remunerate service contractors using concrete parameters such as total kilometers driven, driver behavior, safe driving, route adherence. New scheduling systems are already generating sizeable monthly savings," says Shankar.

SCADL is now looking at developing multi-modal travel services spanning BRT, metro, railway, monorail, taxis, etc. and offering seamless services supported by integrated operation and ticketing platforms. Shankar believes,"NEC has depth, tremendous transport products and experience of complex projects in Tokyo and elsewhere. It can invite the other 99 Indian smart city candidates to witness the success of the Ahmedabad ITMS, and extend it."
Both partners share the same fundamental measure of that success.

"Throughout this project, NEC Technologies India orchestrated a group of 20 vendors and partners scattered worldwide because our primary motivation is to build synergies, and leverage our transportation solutions portfolio and ICT to create advanced social infrastructure, and improve India's society," states Fujii.
For Shankar: "With the systems now in place, our citizens' personalities can bloom, and they can become the best they can be. We are proud to run a system like that."