Pune Mahanagar Parivahan Mahamandal Ltd (PMPML), the public transport bus service provider for the twin cities of Pune and Pimpri Chinchwad, and the Pune Metropolitan Region Development Authority (PMRDA) on Tuesday announced a collaboration with Google Cloud to build an Intelligent transit management system and feed system to track buses live on Google Maps.

PMPML operates 371 routes around the Pune Metropolitan Region including 117 Rainbow Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) routes that ply on the seven bus rapid transit corridors and this technology will reportedly enable commuters to find the bus in real-time.

PMPML said in a statement that it has hardware installed on its buses which are capable of sending real-time data. With this partnership PMPML is looking to:

Transition to a globally accepted specification General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) for publishing the transit information

Use any available data from the above to provide insights to their management team on different performance aspects of their fleet

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“The collaboration will help them ingest real-time data from all applicable buses from the OBU (onboard unit) system installed on the PMPML buses. They will further validate the data for GTFS field values. Then the data will get fed to the Google Maps Partner Dashboard for a complete GTFS validation. Once published on Google Maps, the Live Transit Updates service will allow commuters to track buses in real-time on Google Maps,” the statement added.

The system is further said to include the features of Transport Analytics including asset tracking, predictive maintenance and incident response in the next phase to reduce the operational cost and increase the revenue.

Google Cloud will work through its premier partner Niveus Solutions Pvt. Ltd and others for this engagement.

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