Public transport data modelling

Many new advances are being made in technology and software, which may help public transport operators. However, the software products of different suppliers are often incompatible or difficult to integrate, because they use different data structures. To avoid this problem operators may restrict their choice to limited ranges of products from an individual supplier, which may not offer the required functionality, or they may run products separately. This is clearly inefficient, in that it means storing similar data in separate databases and inhibits the effective synergy of integrated operations. The author discusses how EEC´s DRIVE initiative has asked the Transmodel team within the EuroBus project to address this problem by producing a data model which may be used as a European standard or reference for the bus industry