Budapest opts for GMV’s fleet-management and passenger-information system

GMV, Spain’s leader in fleet management systems for urban-bus and railway transport, has won an important contract for supplying Budapest’s new fleet management system in a consortium with Synergon Rendszerintegrátor Kft. The contract has been awarded by BKV, Budapesti Közlekedési Zrt, Budapest’s public transport company. Budapest thus becomes Hungary’s second city to install one of the most advanced systems on the market for giving passengers real time information on the state of urban transport.

This system will be fitted on the buses, trolleybuses and trams of the city of Budapest and also on BKV’s vehicle fleet. The system will manage a total of 2295 urban vehicles and will also be integrated with BKV’s own corporate systems.

In the words of Juan Antonio March, Director of GMV Sistemas S.A.U.: “Budapest is a very important European city and this contract, under which we will install the fleet-management system controlling the biggest number of vehicles to date, will allow us to reinforce our worldwide leading position in the development of advanced fleet-management and passenger-information systems.”

Under this fleet-management system, information posts will be set up throughout the whole city with high resolution LCD (liquid crystal) and LED (light emitting diode) display screens showing the estimated times of arrival of all transport vehicles at the various stops. This information can also be accessed from the website, SMS or PDAs.

Communication between the information posts and control center is by way of GSM/GPRS/HSDPA technology, contracted with one of the country’s telephony operators, backed up by WiFi in the bus garages and radio communications using the DMR standard with Selex and Motorola radio infrastructure. Data communication is by GPRS/HSDPA with radio backup. Voice communications are carried on the radio infrastructure with GSM backup in low-coverage areas (when the vehicles leave the built-up area).

The 2295 urban buses included in the system plus the vehicles on the metro and local-train network are all tracked by means of GMV’s onboard unit, with tried and tested reliability and robustness.

The onboard M-20 unit is a mobile GPS tracking system with internal-modem GPRS/GSM/HSDPA communications plus WiFi connectivity. This unit receives the
vehicle-tracking satellite signal and sends on the information to the control center by communications modem.

The control center will be integrated with TransIT’s corporate management system and the city’s traffic-light control system to be able to give real-time traffic-light priority to public transport vehicles. The control center will be made up by servers in high-availability configuration together with entirely GMV-developed software acting as the real core of the whole system. Advanced algorithms of this software calculate the ETAs and the whole project is topped up with driver-communication interfaces.

The contract, with an overall budget of €24 million, began at the end of 2010 and is due to run until March 2012.

This new contract award represents yet another international customer for GMV’s fleet management systems after the systems already up and running in Gdansk, Bydgoszcz and Szczecin (Poland), Putrajaya (Malaysia) and Györ in Hungary itself. At home GMV boasts a market share of over 50%.