Case Study: Vanderbilt University achieves smarter, more efficient transit operations with Google Cloud Platform

Vanderbilt Improving public transit system with Google Cloud's AI

Vanderbilt University, through its SmartTransit research team led by Abhishek Dubey at the Institute for Software Integrated Systems, faced the challenge of analyzing massive, highly unstructured transit, weather, traffic, and GIS data streams to improve public transportation efficiency. The team joined the Google Cloud Research Innovators program and used Google Cloud services, including BigQuery and App Engine, to help manage and analyze data at scale.

With Google Cloud Platform, Vanderbilt University built a prototype that stores and processes multimodal transit data in the cloud and powers an energy visualization dashboard for CARTA. The project has modeled $150,000 in fuel cost savings so far, collected 32.3 million data points for electric buses and 29.8 million for diesel buses, and another pilot showed more than 40% potential efficiency improvement for paratransit and microtransit scheduling.

Vanderbilt University

Abhishek Dubey

Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science