Community Transit is performing market research on available yard/fleet management solutions to be included in the technology stack of future zero emission deployments. Currently, yard dispatchers keep track of standard diesel/hybrid bus inventory by physically walking around the bus yard at night to complete the yard map to note how many of each vehicle type is ready for peak morning pull out. A second walk through is completed prior to peak afternoon pull out to update the inventory. This information is stored via Excel and is updated once those vehicles are assigned. Currently, operators state what bus size they’re assigned to, but with the current parking layout, the bus numbers are not visible to the yard dispatchers. With this, operators are then assigned to whichever the first bus available is next in the parking lane. If the bus size the operator is looking for is not available, they are then asked to move to the next available size (not inclusive of bus rapid transit assignments). The prospective goal is to implement a system to improve this process and prepare for the complexity of managing a zero emission bus fleet, allowing our yard dispatchers to easily track location and charging status of the buses and route assignments based on range profile and assign to operators accordingly under one platform.
