Subscribers of MegaFon were involved in a large experiment on transport

The developer of geoinformation software and Doroga.Tv services started a pilot project with department of transport of Nizhny Novgorod on a research of a transport network of the city, the chief executive of the company Evgeny Makarov in October, 2013 told TAdviser. A project objective is optimization of schedules and routes of public transport service.

The project covers all city and the closest suburb of Nizhny Novgorod. In its course it is investigated how real traffic differs from schedules for what data arrays are analyzed, received for different intervals of time from set on GLONASS/GPS terminals transport. Besides, the passenger traffic is investigated: data analysis about movement of people in this case is performed on the basis of location of mobile phones.

The last is determined by cellular towers, at the same time the obtained data are completely anonymized, Evgeny Makarov says. About providing such data it was succeeded to agree only with MegaFon so far. Other operators could not provide them for various reasons, he adds: "someone is not ready technically, someone did not ripen morally".

If according to the results of "pilot" the decision on the commercial project is made, the city authorities will need to agree also with other operators to receive the broad picture of a passenger traffic, the chief executive Road.TV notes. Besides, it is necessary to agree with operators and about conditions of providing such data. Now, within a pilot project, MegaFon shares them free of charge.

VimpelCom (Beeline works under a brand) can provide data on location of subscribers on base stations to external clients too, the representative of operator Anna Aybasheva told TAdviser: "we are ready to participate in similar projects if the customer accurately defines requirements to a joint product".

According to her, the company already has products with similar functionality: in particular, the "M2M command center" allowing to manage SIM cards in devices in real time and to perform monitoring of the equipment, Avtomonitoring for tracking online movement of moving objects and also Search for position fix of staff of the company in real time across all Russia. Positioning accuracy is defined by a range of the base station in which the mobile phone is registered, and in localities is 250-500 meters, Aybasheva tells. A system sends to the mobile phone the Sms, invisible to the user, also defines location of the base station in which phone is registered.

For a research in Nizhny Novgorod Cloudbus developed Road.TV of software intended for solving of tasks of planning, management and analytics of the movement and also creation of services of informing passengers on public transport service is used. Its deployment is possible as on the party of the customer, so in the company, however the developer inclines to his providing in the form of a cloud service more.

Levels of flux density of people are visualized on the Cloudbus card in the form of multi-colored squares

According to the company, taking into account those who test Cloudbus within different pilot projects now the number of transport registered in a system is about 10 thousand units.

According to the chief executive Road.TV, in parallel with a research in Nizhny Novgorod his company communicates with partner integrators in regions.

It should be noted that the idea of the analysis of movement of people on the basis of location of phones in itself is not new. In particular, abroad there is a number of the projects based on providing such information to clients in different spheres. It is possible to carry the StreetLight Data project to the most known of them.

Visualization of a flow of people on the card of the foreign StreetLight project

"StreetLight works in the similar direction, but, unlike them, except cellular data we have a big section according to the analysis of a transport network", - Evgeny Makarov says.

The similarity of visualization of frequency curve of people on the Cloudbus and StreetLight cards is coincidence, he adds: "it is caused by the fact that visualization of density on the card has a few methods of display".

In 2013 it was also announced the joint project of IBM with Orange operator in the city of Abidjan where correction of routes of transport according to the results of a passenger traffic research on the basis of 5 million subscribers provided to Orange given about location was put by the purpose.