WASHINGTON, June 23, 2014 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Urban Insights Associates Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Cubic Transportation Systems, announced today it is launching a consulting and services practice aimed at helping the transportation industry achieve greater efficiency by optimizing the allocation of resources deployed in urban transportation networks around the world and improving the quality of service delivered to travelers.
"One of the biggest challenges facing the global transportation industry today is the massive amounts of rich data being gathered but underutilized by urban transportation enterprises," said Wade Rosado, director, Analytics for Urban Insights. "By applying big data tools and transportation-specific data science processes, our consultants will transform the way agencies do business. Our predictive analytics tools and techniques will present information in compelling data visualizations and help decision makers comprehend the factors that drive efficiencies as well as influence traveler choice. When we identify stress points in the transportation network, we can help agencies define actions to remedy those situations."
The transportation industry is already a leader in the volume and variety of data that is generated by on-board sensors and data collection points introduced by passenger counting systems, vehicle location systems, ticketing and fare collection systems, and scheduling and asset management systems. Existing data warehouses contain unprecedented potential for deriving insights into planning and managing transportation networks. Still, use of conventional data management tools and practices means these insights remain mostly hidden.
The technology supporting Urban Insights' consulting and services practice is a leading-edge distributed data management and processing platform that is built upon Apache® Hadoop. It is highly scalable and capable of handling the large volume of data generated by systems supporting the transportation industry. The solution also consists of a leading‐edge business intelligence and discovery suite.
"What sets Urban Insights apart is its unmatched transportation sector expertise within its corporate DNA, which informs how we apply these state-of-the-art tools and data science techniques to convert terabytes of disassociated data into strategic and operational assets that will transform entire transportation networks," said Phil Silver, director, Business Development for Urban Insights.
The Urban Insights approach helps transportation agencies improve the way they provision services and ensures that resources are optimally allocated to meet the needs of travelers. For example, the San Diego Metropolitan Transportation System (MTS) is using the new service to gain visibility into commuters' complete journeys as they connect between bus routes or trolley services on the way to their final destination. The MTS and others are challenged to comprehend these journeys because systems record unlinked travel segments. To convert these unlinked trips into journeys, Urban Insights fuses together data from five independent sources, applies its analytic models and uses this information to identify opportunities to improve and align services. The process pinpoints incongruences between the current scheduling and resource allocation with the way riders actually use the services, enabling the MTS to take action and better serve travelers.
In the future, these same tools will help influence behavioral change among travelers and directly influence travel choices. Urban Insights relies on both process improvement and the application of advanced analytic techniques to help evolve existing transportation networks and the way they operate, in order to move more people faster, more conveniently and at a lower cost.
For more information on Urban Insights' consulting and services practice, please contact info@urban-insights.com.
About Urban Insights
Urban Insights operates as a wholly owned subsidiary of Cubic® Transportation Systems, Inc. and provides transportation-specific consulting, services and technology that merge its parent company's domain expertise and technology heritage to empower transportation organizations to gather data, comprehend insights and act on them. Through the Urban Insights approach to business analytics, cities, transportation agencies and authorities can improve operations, reduce cost and better serve travelers through data-informed insights that previously could not be derived using standard reporting tools and methods.
For more information about Urban Insights, please visit the company's website at www.urban-insights.com
URBAN INSIGHTS LAUNCH – Addendum Quotation Sheet
"I applaud Cubic's leadership in the formation of Urban Insights to bring predictive analytics to the industry—providing much-needed insights to help solve transit and mobility problems."
-Michael L. Pack, Director, University of Maryland Center for Advanced Transportation Technology (CATT Laboratory)
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"Congratulations on the launch of Urban Insights. The UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering enjoys a strong partnership with Cubic Transportation, and we look forward to continuing that collaboration as Cubic expands into new application areas through Urban Insights. Predictive analytics is an important emerging field that holds promise for enhancing quality of service in a myriad of industries. It is exciting to see this new application for transportation.
"As a member of the Jacobs School's Corporate Affiliates Program, Cubic Transportation is a key strategic partner of the Jacobs School. In particular, Cubic works with us through research projects, student internship projects, innovation workshops, and Cubic members participate in our Masters of Advanced Study (M.A.S) for Professional engineers.
"Big data is a major strength of UC San Diego and we are proud of our world-renown faculty experts in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering and accomplished research scientists in our San Diego Supercomputer Center. This fall, we are launching a new M.A.S. degree program in Data Science and Engineering. We anticipate that this program, and all programs similar to it, will enjoy industrial relevance and commercial success."
-Albert Pisano, Dean, Irwin and Joan Jacobs School of Engineering, UC San Diego
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"For transport systems to deliver their full potential, cities, agencies and authorities need to make informed decisions, based upon a thorough understanding of what their vast quantity of data means, and how it impacts throughout the entire transport network.
"Cubic's Urban Insights has the genuine potential to become a 'game changer' by improving the efficiency within multi-modal networks and helping operators to take decisive action before problems arise, based upon its data gathering expertise, understanding of what the data means and predictive analytics. Urban Insights should positively contribute to intelligent decision making."
– Andrew Barriball, MD, ROPL & Publisher, ITS International
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"Campaign for Better Transport has worked closely with Cubic Transportation Systems in the UK to make the case for transport decision-makers to make more use of data in designing their policies and planning transport networks. Using the wealth of data which is already being captured from all modes of transport is critical if we are to change the way we use transport infrastructure in this country. We welcome the Urban Insights initiative as another step in giving city planners the tools they need to plan and manage their transport systems, using data rather than theoretical models. We look forward to working with CTS on this initiative in a UK context."
-Stephen Joseph, Chief Executive, Campaign for Better Transport (UK)
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ERTICO – ITS Europe's CEO Dr. Hermann Meyer welcomes such initiatives. "The ITS industry will benefit from the availability of transportation-focused, big data predictive analytics and focused processes. These can play an important role in balancing transportation demand with supply, optimizing resources, advancing mobility service quality, and enabling urban administrators and mobility planners to employ data-driven decision making based on solid data science. Using the available data on different modes of transport can be an important factor in future transport infrastructure development."
- Dr. Hermann Meyer CEO ERTICO- ITS Europe
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"We congratulate Cubic on the creation of Urban Insights and their focus on data, a crucial piece in helping to make our cities smarter using existing infrastructure. Here at RideScout we are always looking for technological improvements that can help people move in cities and we are excited to work with Cubic on the initiative."
– Joseph Kopser, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, RideScout
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"GIRO, a world leader in public transit software for over 35 years, salutes Cubic's leadership in the creation of Urban Insights for providing big data predictive analytics consulting services. This is good news for the public transportation industry.
"Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) have now achieved significant penetration. Although these systems generate a huge amount of data few efforts are being made today to transform this data into actionable intelligence.
"With its ITS expertise as well as its industry familiarity, Cubic is well positioned to lead such an initiative and will help bring big data and predictive analytics to public transportation. This initiative will benefit GIRO's HASRUS customers by enabling them to feed HASTUS' comprehensive decision support systems for optimizing resource utilization, from planning and scheduling to real-time operational decision-making with the actionable intelligence."
-Pierre Trudeau, M.Sc., Vice President, Business Development, GIRO