How does schedule data improve real-time information?

Most of the time, you cannot have nice real-time information without publishing correct schedule transport offer. And having rich planned data makes your real-time information even better. And also your real-time data feed can inform about the quality of your schedule data. We will explore some of the interactions between real-time data feeds and schedule data.

Your real-time data made more meaningful with your schedule data

Let’s start with the obvious: your real-time information needs schedule data to make sense for passenger information use cases:

• You are broadcasting a delay on a service. It only makes sense when the planned service is known,
• You are sharing a change of schedule. It is more meaningful if the planned shedule is shared ahead.

Then, you have plenty of cases in which the schedule data is absolutely needed for your real-time information to be meaningful. The most common ones are:

• The details of your equipment and services, so real-time information can focus on their status (e.g., elevator status in a station),
• The details of your planned offer, so the real-time feeds can focus only on the changes (e.g., re-routing due to construction work),
• Facilitating re-routing and connection information in the case of an interruption / delay of services, mostly for travellers who will need guidance on how to divert their trips.

In general, having a rich schedule data serves as basis of your real-time information and will allow you to:

• Save resources (both sides) for the reconstruction of the “normal” services,
• Benefit from a baseline to analyse the differences between what was planned and what actually happened,
• Ensuring consistency between both feeds, so it is easier for third parties to consume your data.

On how to better bridge your schedule data with your real-time data, we advise you to consult our User Manual guide on sharing publication codes (or IDs) between both feeds.

When your real-time data helps you improve schedule data

We often hear that broadcasing real-time data comes at a high cost for both data producers and consumers, due to the volume of data that is exchanged. This cost is even higher if your schedule data is not rich enough. So, in order to reduce the costs of broadcasting real-time information, we strongly advise you to:

• Make your schedule data as rich as possible (e.g., details on your tranfers, your equipment, etc.),
• Provide sufficient updates of your planned offer, so that the real-time data can focus on short-term changes.

Also, we would like to highlight some cases in which having rich real-time data can help you optimise your public transport offer.

• When you start broadcasting equipment status, you realize that there is a lot more static information that you can have for the latter. So, you can feed it back to your schedule information.
• If some of your services are always marked as late, then it might be time to revisit the route and/or schedule.
• If you want to broadcast your vehicle position on a map, then you need to describe the actual route that the vehicle is taking.

And so, all in all, having high quality real-time passenger information allows you to improve your schedule data, which in turn generate richer real-time information. Creating a virtuous circle with your data.