Data quality and transit delay analysis for historical AVL data based on the SIRI protocol

Abstract

Traffic agencies are investing in advanced technologies to improve their services. An automatic vehicle monitoring (AVM) system with vehicle location provides vehicles with a device to record information. In a bus transit system, vehicles transmit information about the trip to an external server each time it arrives at a destined terminal. The instant benefit is to create a real time overview of the system, giving the agency the ability to monitor the system and locate delays and problems faster. However, storing this information creates a valuable dataset of transit information. The collected data may be explored, visualized and analyzed to find patterns, tendencies and other useful information which can contribute to make improvements on the bus system. In this thesis, historical data from four routes located in Stavanger was used as a case study. The data was collected from an automatic vehicle location (AVL) system using the Service Interface for Real Time Information (SIRI) standard. The thesis focuses on the development of trip delay on the bus stop level, delta delay for locating bottlenecks as well as the quality of the data analyzed.