GMV technology controls Warsaw’s trams

GMV, leader in turnkey systems for urban public-transport management, has successfully finished installation of the real-time fleet management and passenger information system, with control center, for Warsaw’s whole tram fleet. The system had been working on a test basis since last November.

Warsaw is Poland’s capital and largest city with a population of nearly two million. Its trams are the easiest and quickest way of moving round the city; there are over twenty tramlines with 470 kilometers of track, most of them running from 05.00 to 23.00 hours.

The new platform installed by GMV in the Polish capital keeps a track of each tram’s whereabouts and state at all moments and also of any running incidents that might crop up. The new system improves efficiency and running speeds and gives much more accurate ETA information for each tram.

The passenger information system includes 68 double-sided display panels fitted at a great number of stops, giving information on ETAs or final destinations. The system is especially adapted for the blind and visually handicapped, who will hear arrival information on a voice synthesizer. Under this project real-time information is also provided on cell phones and Warswaw trams’ website: http://www.tw.waw.pl/

The advanced fleet management system, for its part, includes GMV’s inhouse railway system SAE-R® fitted onboard a total of 480 trams and the control center platform installed in the offices of Warsaw Tramlines.

Warsaw’s tram fleet will be tracked by means of GMV’s highly robust and dependable R-AVL-A30 onboard unit, a mobile GPS tracking appliance with GPRS/GSM/UMTS communications based on an internal modem. This will also allow monitoring of service performance against real-time planning.

The control center is made up by servers in high-availability configuration together with entirely GMV-developed software acting as the real core of the whole system. The advanced algorithms of this software enable tram-stop ETAs to be calculated with only tiny margins of error.

The solution developed by GMV for Warsaw’s trams has already been successfully set up on the tramlines of Mallorca and Zaragoza and in various business units of the Spanish mainline network RENFE for the management of its whole fleet (over 1800 trains). It is also shaping up as the standard to be fitted in future railway projects (trains, trams and light rail transit systems).

At worldwide level GMV’s advanced fleet management system is being successfully set up in several cities of Poland, Malaysia, USA, Uruguay, India, Mexico and Indonesia.