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Ruter, Oslo's mass-transit company[1], plans to kill two birds with one stone.
It's not only aiming to build a more efficient and flexible IT system for operating its buses, but it also wants to provide the Norwegian capital with data for new smart-city applications and services.
Smart cities need lots of data for planning, decision-making and new services. Mass-transit vehicles are everywhere in the city, so using them to provide real-time data for these applications make obvious sense.
However, Oslo's buses currently have seven separate and proprietary systems on board, to support live data for several functions, including ticketing, passenger information, position reporting to the control center, and providing technical maintenance data to the bus operators.
These systems don't interoperate and, in some instances, they even need separate radio communications for their respective uses.
See: Our autonomous future: How driverless cars will be the first robots we learn to trust (cover story PDF)[2]
Ruter has been engaged in international standardization work through public transportation tech association ITxPT[3] to address the vendor lock-in it's been experiencing.
The goal is for tomorrow's buses to carry an open and standards-based IT platform with interfaces and protocols that all vendors will have to support.
The result will be an easier systems-integration environment, where subsystems will be able to share resources such as GPS and radio communications, as well as their data where applicable.
The immediate operational upside for Ruter is easier data management and much shorter time to implement new functions and services. In the process, more data will be made available to Ruter, the city, and to third-party developers.
"This means that from having closed,