Public Transport Information Systems Research Articles

Increasing the sophistication of access measurement in a rural healthcare study

This paper considers the problem of deriving realistic access measures between population demand and health service locations, in the context of a rural region of England. The paper reviews approaches used in earlier work by the authors and others, and considers new public transport information systems that are now becoming available. An application is presented which incorporates the modelling of both private and public transportation travel times for access to district general hospitals in Cornwall. This information has been assembled from published timetables in order to evaluate the use of more sophisticated access measures that might be used when such data becomes more generally available. The work is set within the context of an ongoing substantive research programme concerned with health outcomes in the rural South West of England.

Towards integrated traveller information

Traveller information provision has become a key government priority in the UK following the publication of its Transport White Paper in July 1998. Developments are already underway for the integration of information systems across different public transport modes and between public transport information systems covering different regions. The Highways Agency (which is responsible for managing the strategic road network in the UK) is also advancing in its development of information databases and systems for the motorist. This paper considers the prospect of providing travellers with multimodal information with integration of driver information with public transport information. If such integration can be achieved then travellers, and in particular drivers, have the prospect of being presented with comparable information on travel options across modes. An integrated information service has a great potential to inform and influence travel choices. The paper considers the issue of travel choices and the role that information can play particularly in the context of mode choice. The political (UK) and technological climate for information provision is outlined. The paper identifies issues that will need to be addressed to identify the requirements from, and potential benefits of, integrated information, and the obstacles and challenges likely to be faced in moving towards it. Driver reactions, in particular, to the prospect of integrated information provision are fundamental to the assessment of its potential importance and value.

Context-sensitive spoken dialogue processing with the DOP model

We show how the DOP model can be used for fast and robust context-sensitive processing of spoken input in a practical spoken dialogue system called OVIS. OVIS (Openbaar Vervoer Informatie Systeem) – ‘Public Transport Information System’, is a Dutch spoken language information system which operates over ordinary telephone lines. The prototype system is the immediate goal of the NWO Priority Programme ‘Language and Speech Technology’. In this paper, we extend the original Data-Oriented Parsing (DOP) model to context-sensitive interpretation of spoken input. The system we describe uses the OVIS corpus (which consists of 10,000 trees enriched with compositional semantics) to compute from an input word-graph the best utterance together with its meaning. Dialogue context is taken into account by dividing up the OVIS corpus into context-dependent subcorpora. Each system question triggers a subcorpus by which the user answer is analysed and interpreted. Our experiments indicate that the context-sensitive DOP model obtains better accuracy than the original model, allowing for fast and robust processing of spoken input.

New Concepts in Public Transport Information Systems

Passenger Information Systems for Public Transport in urban areas have entered a new era, following the recent developments in information and communication technologies. As a result of research carried out in this respect, in the DRIVE I and ATT Programmes, new concepts for Public Transport Information Systems (PTIS) have resulted Many of them come from the CASSIOPE system, based on the design of a kernel data model and a common RDBMS appropriate for all functional domains The EUROBUS/POPINS terminals designed and developed for three European cities are also presented. Finally the likely impacts to Public Transport patronage are examined.