Recent decades have witnessed great advancements in the area of technology across various industries. Some of these technologies such as cloud computing, service oriented architecture, advanced cellular data and mobile internet devices, big data mining and predictive analytics, and social media are relevant to the transportation industry but there has been limited adoption of such technologies. While the adoption of these technologies will still depend heavily on the capabilities of agencies to overcome technical, organizational, institutional, financial and industrial challenges, agencies could begin to adopt these technologies by improving critical functions such as operations management. Transit agencies have been using computer-aided dispatch (CAD) tools, powered by global positioning system (GPS)-based automatic vehicle location (AVL) since the late 1980s. Even though these tools have evolved over the years, they have not kept pace with advances in technology. Some of these advancements can augment CAD tools by harnessing the power of technologies and the data that they generate. These include predictive and proactive dispatch, scenario databases, feedback loops into planning and scheduling of archived ITS data, social media integration, and third-party developer application programming interfaces (APIs). This paper provides an overview of these advancements for transit operations management.
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