PLANNING AND MANAGEMENT OF TIMETABLES

 ONTIME Data Sheet 

Overview 

ONTIME is a standard decision-support tool for creating and updating timetables of transportation services to be executed over a transportation network. It allows the allocation of the network throughout time, considering the defined services and all the operational constraints such as network capacity.

Due to the recent trends in the transportation industry towards liberalisation, companies are increasingly being required to share infrastructure with other operators, giving rise to additional operational constraints, but also to match demand with the most efficient use of resources in order to manage costs and to sustain competitiveness.

ONTIME addresses, in an integrated way, all phases of the planning and management process of timetables – long-term planning, short-term planning, real-time management, and control. It allows for an efficient and effective evaluation of scenarios, speeds up the timetable creation process and reduces the time to adjust to market fluctuations while maximizing the use of resources to meet demand.

At any stage of the process, the integration of a very powerful optimiser with the possibility of manual intervention provides an unprecedent power and flexibility that are unmatched by any other system in the market.

The modularity of ONTIME enables transportation companies to introduce different software components in their process at their own pace.  Alongside with the power of the product, ONTIME-based solutions can be fully customised to the reality of each individual company.

Main features

• Allows importing a demand matrix for a given line to define the commercial offer of transportation services on different routes while complying with equipment constraints such as vehicle balancing and parking

• Enables simulation and what-if scenarios by validating if the commercial offer is met by defined services timetables

• Timetable performance may be evaluated from a passenger perspective by recording average connection times for all passenger trips

• Provides the definition of service patterns to speed up the creation of services who share similar characteristics

• Supports extensive options regarding timetable creation: manual edition, service pattern based (essential for periodic timetables) or fully automatic

• Allows validation of network usage, identifying capacity violations. Validation includes restrictions such as headway, single track occupancy and inversion time. It can also identify free slots available for additional transportation services

• Supports different vehicle types. Minimum travel times can be different for each type of vehicle or composition

• Enables standard reporting with printing and XML exporting capabilities. These reports include timetable output, both for staff and passengers, and performance figures for timetable, like driven kilometres, percentage of empty stock vehicles

• Prepared to be fully integrated with existing systems using standard protocols and data interfaces

• Interconnectable with CREWS (staff) and FLEET (equipment) software

Modules

• Long-term Planner (generates timetables for an abstract week)

• Short-term Planner (generates timetables for specific calendar days, handling planned changes to regular timetables such as holidays or engineering work)

• Real-time Dispatcher (monitors what is happening during the day of operation and provides decision-support to deal with unexpected events)

• Recording and Reporting (computes the work that has been done, updates system information for management reporting and prepares the information to be supplied to outside systems)

• Long-term Data Manager, Short-term Data Manager (provides the interface with outside systems, handles changes in data, maintains the consistency and completeness of data)