Warsaw awards GMV a tramline management contract

GMV, Spanish leader in passenger information systems for the management of bus and railway fleets, has won a contract for setting up and maintaining a real-time passenger information system with control center for part of Warsaw’s tram fleet. Poland has once more taken up GMV’s system from among 14 other bidding companies, making Warsaw the fifth Polish city to install one of the market’s most advanced systems for giving passengers real-time urban transport information.

In the words of Juan A. March, GMV’s General Manager of Transport and Mobility, “Warsaw is one of Europe’s leading cities and this fifth Polish contract reinforces our worldwide leadership in the development of advanced fleet management and passenger information systems, while also strengthening our position in other countries.”

The new platform to be installed in Warsaw will keep a constant track on the position and state of each tram at all moments while also reporting on any operational incident that might crop up. The system will enhance efficiency and operational speed and give better information on each tram running on the line.

The Passenger Information System includes 40 double-sided display panels to be fitted at 40 stops, giving information on ETAs or final destinations. The system will be especially adapted for the blind, who will hear arrival information on a voice synthesizer. Under this project real-time information will also be provided on cell phones and the website. The Advanced Fleet Management System included in the contract includes the onboard railway fleet management system (SAE-R®) for 150 trams plus the control center to be fitted in the offices of the Warsaw tramline operating company Tramwaje Warszawskie Sp. z.o.o.

Together with the existing panels and the trams already fitted out, GMV’s system will be running a total of 68 panels and 480 trams. The project also allows for upsizing to 600 trams and 500 stops.

The trams of Warsaw’s tram fleet will be tracked by means of a mobile GPS tracking appliance with GPRS/GSM/UMTS communications based on an internal modem. This will receive the satellite signal and send it on to the control center by means of the communications modem. This will also allow monitoring of service performance against real-time planning.

The control center will be made up by servers in high-availability configuration together with entirely GMV-developed software acting as the real core of the whole system. The advanced algorithms of this software enable tram-stop ETAs to be calculated with only tiny margins of error.

Warsaw, Poland’s biggest city, has been the country’s capital since 1596. Its population is 1.7 million and about 2.8 million people live in its whole metropolitan area. It lies right in the center of the country in the Mazowsze region (of which it is also the capital city) on the banks of the Vistula River.

This contract award represents yet another international customer for GMV in the transport area, to be added to the intelligent transportation systems that GMV is developing in Putrajaya (Malaysia), Ahmedabad (India) Budapest (Hungary) and those of Gdansk, Bydgoszcz, Czechowice-Dziedzice and Szczecin in Poland itself.