Transforming Transportation: How Teradata's Data Analytics Ecosystem Revolutionized a Smart City's Multi-Modal Transportation Authority

This citywide multi-modal transportation authority manages a transportation system that’s critical for keeping its millions of citizens and socio-economic development moving. The authority oversees this task through traffic management, and regulation of private and public transit. It plans, develops, and manages for short- and long-term needs to provide an efficient, people-centered system that includes roads, rail, buses, taxis, and private vehicles. Given this city’s fast-paced development and growing population, the projected demand is expected to strain the public transportation system if not planned for properly. To serve these anticipated needs, the authority drafted its Land Transport Master Plan for transportation network investments that forecasted needs over a decade. In addition to a rapidly growing population, ever-expanding data volumes posed a considerable challenge to their technology infrastructure. The authority relies on data and applications to ensure smooth travel for all—capturing more than 12 million records on public transport each day. However, land transport IT systems were designed for quick response time, with priority given to keeping transactions moving; but not for keeping data beyond three months. Lost data meant a lost ability to conduct meaningful trend analysis, create long-term policy planning, or engage in data mining.

Citywide multi-modal transportation authority

The customer is a citywide multi-modal transportation authority responsible for managing and regulating the transportation system of a fast-paced city with a growing population. They oversee traffic management and the operation of private and public transit, including roads, rail, buses, taxis, and private vehicles. The authority relies on data and applications to ensure smooth travel for all citizens, capturing over 12 million records on public transport each day.

Teradata initiated a proof-of-concept study to identify a suitable enterprise data warehouse that would address their growing data volumes and, more importantly, put their data to work. Several test scenarios assessing performance, scalability, and workload management resulted in a 99 percent improvement in query response times. Following these encouraging results, Teradata embarked on a full-scale implementation of a data analytics ecosystem utilizing technology from Teradata. Its implementation helped the authority set a course for creating a decision capability that supports its vision of a truly people-centric transportation system. Today, the ecosystem provides the transportation authority with advanced capabilities to perform large-scale business analytics, and transport simulation in the deployment of various Land Transport Master Plan initiatives. This enables planners to determine levels of efficiency and resource optimization—tracking traffic flow and behavior, passenger loading, route running times, and transfer volumes for advanced trend analysis.

• [Data Management
  smart data management is key to a smart city for the transportation authority, data-driven policy and planning decisions with fast turnaround were regarded as the critical success factors of the strategy.
• [Data Management
  a smart data management system uses the infrastructure to take data from agency silos, bring it together with data from a wide variety of other sources, then make the information accessible for advanced analytics.
• [Data Management
  a practical approach to smart data management addresses current problems, but it must also be flexible enough to overcome emerging challenges.