News
The pupil transportation sector is slower to see and adopt Saas, Maas and MBaas, but their eventual impacts promise to be big
Building a Better Tomorrow Today WRITTEN BY ERIC WOOLSON N
ot so long ago, buses that could automatically send mechanics real-time data that communicated service needs as well as vehicle and driver safety measurements remained locked in the imagination of technology
visionaries and transportation industry daydreamers. Not anymore. And, if those not-too-distant pipe dreams are now reality, what does the future hold for all this technology and the vaunted Inter- net of Tings (IoT) when it comes to pupil transportation? Shaping the future is where guys like GP Singh, CEO and founder of Naperville, Ill.-based ByteCurve, and Jamie Milne, an engagement manager in the IoT practice at St. Louis-headquar- tered World Wide Technology, come in. Singh and Milne note that as fleet managers and other transporta-
tion pros leverage the massive amounts of data now at their fingertips, they’ll continue to see the growing impact of a couple of technology code acronyms: SaaS and MaaS. SaaS is shorthand for Software as a Service. MaaS stands for Mobility as a Service. And, MaaS is entirely different than Mobile Back-end as a Service or MBaaS, which con- nects mobile applications to cloud computing services. Milne uses the analogy of a laundry service when explaining SaaS.
“You have a couple options to do your laundry. You can go to the laundromat, where you need to get quarters for the washing machine. Buy soap, put the laundry in the washer, leave for an hour and come back. Move the laundry to the dryer, put quarters in the dryer and wait for the wash to finish. Put quarters in the dryer, come back in another hour and fold your clothes,” Milne explained. “Or, you can go to a wash-and-fold and they hand you back a bag of clean, dry and neatly folded clothes. Tat costs you a little extra, but you don’t need to worry about the details. Tat’s what SaaS is. You don’t need to worry about what’s going on in the background.”
26 School Transportation News • OCTOBER 2017
THINK NETFLIX, BUT FOR SCHOOL BUSES MaaS, on the other hand, is “the vision for where the transpor- tation industry is going,” Singh said. Te framework that enables MaaS, in which vehicles are communicating with traffic signals, surrounding vehicles, parking lots and other features, is in the advanced research stage. Broader use is coming sooner than later. But, as is true with other technological advances, the trucking and passenger vehicle sectors lead the way while “we’re still at step one for school buses,” Singh observes. He encourages people to think of MaaS as they would think of Netflix, the subscriber-based service that streams movies and television programs online. MaaS subscrib- ers will pay a monthly fee to have autonomous vehicles pick them up and drop them off at their desired destination. Eventually, an integrated MaaS network will take users anywhere in the world. What started as basic global positioning to track bus locations has exploded into data-gathering juggernauts. And, it was logical that companies found new uses for that data to better serve industry needs, Singh says. Big data is destined to change safety, operations and maintenance for the better. Leading OEMs now have cloud-based frameworks that monitor
vehicle fault codes, indicating which vehicles need service to prevent on-road breakdowns. “Tis is still yet to be applied in the school bus industry,” Singh says. “But there’s no reason not to do it.” Because systems with the firepower to process massive amounts
of real-time data are now the norm, districts are able to predict which drivers or routes are more accident-prone, which routes are most likely to miss on-time arrivals, which parts have higher reliability and even which buses are likely to have a breakdown. Potential savings are massive. Milne has been involved with a project called Bus Central, a proof
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