Malaysia once more turns to GMV for its public transport management

GMV, leader in turnkey systems for urban public-transport management, has recently been awarded, as prime contractor, the integral transport management system for the operator Rapid Kuantan of the city of Kuantan, capital of the state of Pahang.

GMV has signed a turnkey project for Kuantan’s public bus-transport system with Syarikat Prasarana Berhad, the country’s biggest public transport company, government owned and operating in most of Malaysia’s fleets. Improvement of the urban transport system is one of the 7 key initiatives identified by the Malaysian government within the Government Transformation Program (GTP) and Prasarana is without any doubt playing a crucial role in this whole process.

The management system provided by GMV will be set up in the whole bus fleet, supported by city-wide information posts with liquid-crystal-display (LCD) screens displaying ETAs of the various buses at each bus stop plus voice information for the visually handicapped and other multimedia content. This same information can also be accessed from the website.

This project also includes a fare-collection system with ticket-vending and read/write machines integrating two types of contactless farecards: some used also for toll-road and parking-lot payments around the whole country; and others, owned by the operator Prasarana, which are also good for the train, monorail and other bus fleets within Malaysia. Together with the usual backoffice system tools like MSC-Configura, MSC-Depura and MSC-Reporting, there will also be card recharging and personalization posts in all the main stations plus handhelds for inspectors.

Buses will also be fitted with a video-surveillance system (CCTV) for recording, online or offline downloading, video display and on-vehicle recording by means of IP technology cameras.

Communication between information posts, buses and the control center will be by way of 3G/4G, WiFi and GSM voice technology. Buses will be tracked by GMV’s onboard REC30 unit, which combines in a single device the tracking equipment, fleet-management equipment and CCTV video recorder with online streaming.

The control center will comprise servers in high availability configuration together with software entirely developed by GMV and acting as the veritable core of the whole system. Advanced algorithms enable the arrival times at each bus stop to be predicted with only a tiny margin of error. This will not only serve as a management tool for the control center operators but will also inform passengers in real time of bus arrival times on bus-stop panels. Apart from the fleet-management operator posts to be installed in the server there will also be light posts for handheld or PDA installation. As well as voice communications and a messaging service these will also allow inspectors to keep track of vehicle positioning at all times.

In the words of Juan March, GMV’s General Manager of Transport and Mobility: “this contract endorses Malaysia’s ongoing confidence in GMV. The country’s first ever transport management system was set up in Putrajaya. Now, together with the Kuantan system this will serve as a showcase of GMV’s working system not only for the rest of Malaysia but also the whole of South-East Asia. This will reinforce our international leadership in the development of advanced fleet management and passenger information systems whole also strengthening our business in other countries. Moreover, priming this contract is going to give us a high profile in the public transport industry of this region and also greater control over project implementation and the quality of the products and services supplied”.