Public Transport

Pilotfish's system for public transport use is called Pilotfish^® Wanda. It offers a monitored wireless connection to on-board equipment in modern public transport vehicles and includes services such as Pilotfish^® Fuel Economy.

Pilotfish^® Wanda is a well-proven technology with over 10M hours and 80M km of commercial use! Västtrafik, Sweden's second largest public transport authority with a fleet of 1800 vehicles is world-famous for their long history of introducing innovative technology into the world of public transport. In March 2006, they started to install autonomous vehicle gateways from Pilotfish as cornerstone of their new on-board IT architecture, initially to solve wireless communication for a new ticketing system. Until then, new on-board application included new communication channels. Finally, Västtrafik decided to stop the hedgehogging (some vehicles had up to eleven antennas on the roof), and introduced an IP-based, on-board network controlled by our autonomous gateway. Since then new on-board systems have continuously been integrated, including video surveillance and passenger information systems and on-board computers.

Pilotfish^® Fuel Economy; A system that heelps reduce fuel consumption and CO₂ emissions sustainably by up to 15% Eco-driving is a well-known concept, especially within the logistics sector. Despite initially good results, in many cases the effect quickly fades and is often reduced to less than 2% fuel savings within a few months. Pilotfish now introduces a new concept for eco-driving, adapted specifically for the European public transport sector. The system has documented sustainable fuel savings of over 10% which indicates yearly savings of over 3.000 EURO and 10 tons of CO₂ per vehicle! The system considers factors with high impact on the fuel consumption that are out of the drivers’ control. Parameters such as vehicle model, type of route, passengers’ weight and weather conditions are excluded. The remaining factors can all be controlled by the driver. Braking, speeding and unnecessary use of idling are continuously displayed to the driver as the current Excess Fuel Consumption - the EFC. Wireless Pilotfish^® Fuel Economy paper (pdf)

Efficient communication with advanced routing The autonomous gateway connects existing on-board equipment, such as ticketing machines, passenger information and video surveillance systems, with a central back-office. Using a patented algorithm, it enables transparent, simple and efficient communication between the systems. The communication is based on the most suitable of the concurrent bearers, enabling an optimised combination of e.g. WiFi in depots, private Tetra or PMR network in the central city and public GSM or 3G network in other areas operated by the fleet.

Wireless communication is here to stay but will never stop evolving History shows how costly it is to lock into one specific operator or technology when it comes to wireless communication. When integrating the wireless modems in each on-board application, the increasing costs for subscriptions and maintenance quickly multiply by the number of application. Separating the applications from the communication enables lowered initial HW investment, shared maintenance and subscription costs and the possibility to let made investments take benefit from adding new communication channels. The separation is made using a vehicle gateway. Pilotfish has added intelligence to the gateway and made it autonomous - we introduce the autonomous gateway for modern public transport vehicles as part of our Vehicle Connectivity Platform.

The Vehicle Connectivity Platform - Pilotfish^® Wanda Foundation - The on-board autonomous gateway is connected to a back-end server application for monitoring and administration. Pilotfish^® Wanda Foundation is the platform on which many different services are deployed e.g. gateway administration, gateway registration, automatic vehicle location, maintenance services etc. You can find more information about how the vehicle connectivity platform can future proof your vehicle infrastructure and lower your costs in our Wireless Gateway product paper (pdf)

Certified Solution Providers While Pilotfish is keeping focus on the vehicle connectivity platform, we continuously expand our service offer together with niche experts in e.g. eco-driving, video surveillance or crash memories for train.Pilotfish's long experience as a telematics systems integrator comes in handy when certifying new solutions - the Certified Solution Provider-stamp equals a hassle free implementation for our customers.

Open vehicle gateway, soon standardised on European level Pilotfish is actively involved in standardising the concept of autonomous vehicle gateways on European level (CEN TC278 / WG3 / SG1), a work lead by Veolia Transport. Until the standards have been defined, our autonomous gateway will continue to be based on open, widely spread technologies, like Linux operative system and IP-based network on the vehicle and Web Services for back-end integration.

For more information about Pilotfish's public transport solutions
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Photos on this page by BLR (top left) and Jan Efraimsson (top right).