Exploiting telecommunications to deliver real time transport information

This paper reviews our research in the use of novel telecommunications services to collate and provide both personalised and community wide, time critical, transport information. The objective is to explore opportunities offered by telecommunications to improve the efficiency and use of transport services. Innovative uses of advanced Internet technologies coupled with information delivery using messaging technologies, such as pagers and mobile phones are described. We outline the impact of recent advances in server based applications on the management and delivery of dynamic information. We review an Internet based application that takes real time bus location data and predicts arrival times, delivered using a variety of novel telecommunication services.