Transit
RFind offers a pragmatic and cost-effective real-time location system (RTLS) that completes your AVL system at typical ‘blind spots’ such as terminals, parking & maintenance yards and along those parts of fixed routes downtown or underground. Now track your fleet in real-time, everywhere; automate your driver assignment; and track pull-outs and schedule adherence – and use that data to keep your customers informed, improve your operations’ efficiency and reduce service disruptions.
As a transit system Planner, Operations Manager, Maintenance Supervisor, Procurement or Finance Team lead, do you:
- Want to give your customers the best service possible?
- Face operational issues at your garages, terminals and maintenance depots?
- Find that manual systems for parking management are becoming insufficient?
- Understand that automated real-time vehicle location information is the key?
- Have limited budgets and funds, with many projects chasing them?
- Would like to plan for future technology improvement projects?
- Need to stay informed about the latest developments in AVL technologies?
You need to know about RFind’s key Applications for Transit and our answers to these questions (click each to open in a new tab):
- Parking management systems for garages and depots
- Real-time passenger information at transit terminals
- Automatic Vehicle Location (AVL) along fixed routes
“RFind’s flexible solutions are an affordable technology tool for AVL that makes transit networks more efficient to operate and more convenient to use.” Sharon Barnes, CEO RFind
RFind provides highly cost-effective real-time location systems (RTLS) for vehicles and movable assets to public transit system operators and other municipal service organisations such as the Police & Emergency Services, Road Maintenance and Waste Management services.
Mutliple Location Methods in One
RTLS technology has application in these services by providing a highly cost-effective (AVL) solutions for the real-time tracking and location of vehicles, buses & train cars within depots & yards, transit terminals & hubs, maintenance facilities and along fixed routes.
RFind readily partners with your preferred CAD/AVL and other Transit management system providers on appropriate projects where our areas of expertise are required for components of wide-ranging ITS implementation projects. All ITS and CAD/AVL suppliers are invited to find out more about partnering with RFind.
What RFind Delivers
One that is easy, flexible, adaptable and quick to deploy with minimal impact on daily operations. It will integrate with your existing management systems, while delivering a real return on investment well within the system’s expected life-span. It offers a cost-effective alternative to GPS technology, or can be used where GPS struggles to work for you, such as downtown, indoors or underground.
Locate those misplaced or incorrectly parked buses immediately in the garage, without those time-consuming manual searches that can disrupt scheduled operations and maintenance jobs leading to reduced customer service levels.
Your planning, control and monitoring is made much easier with always up-to-date knowledge of the location of tagged vehicles, buses, train cars, inventory and equipment, along with their usage and maintenance history. Systems can be deployed, even temporarily, to obtain performance metrics for efficiency evaluations. Operations become more resilient and agile.
Your maintenance scheduling and work-planning benefits from real-time knowledge of where assets and equipment are located, ensuring the right asset (bus, train car etc.) and required service equipment are in the right location at the right time for the scheduled maintenance job.
Through constant monitoring of the usage and maintenance of tagged assets, you can ensure that each asset is used to the maximum benefit possible, eliminate unnecessary excess inventory and ensure that maintenance occurs at the right time.
Real-time locating means that both daily service operations and maintenance activities have detailed audit trails recorded to provide proof of compliance with required schedules and activities.
Unauthorized removal or movement of tagged assets, fleet vehicles or equipment in RTLS covered areas is promptly detected, helping eliminate costs and service level impacts arising from theft or misuse.
How Does RFind Do It?
With simple, scalable, flexible, affordable, ‘Infrastructure Free’ RTLS technology that offers:
Tags + Gateway + Software = affordable, real-time asset and vehicle location
Tags are wireless and self-powered, so can be placed almost anywhere. No wiring, cables or power is needed. But if you prefer, mains, low voltage, vehicle-fed and solar power options for all hardware are also available.
Mix your accuracy depending on your needs and budget, RFind supports multiple location finding methods and accuracy levels, from simply ‘is it on-site?’ down to ‘which parking bay is it in?’ as you need.
Slot & Sequence, Tri-lateral (2D), and Zonal locating, Point to Point tracking, Chokepoint (or Portal) locating, and Presence Detection are the common location finding methods, we can do them all in one system, all on one site.
You can use the same hardware but in different applications, for different purposes. Our hardware offers a number of functional configurations to meet your key needs. Tags can be configured wirelessly, in-situ.
Our hardware can be packaged to suit your needs. You can attach our tags using anything from screws and straps to magnets or velcro, whatever works best for you and your processes.
No two RTLS projects are the same, however our platform allows for flexibility by being highly configurable and through mixing the most pragmatic location finding methods to meet your needs.
Our most recent AVL project completed is with Calgary Transit, providing an AVL system for their entire light rail carriage fleet across the city’s network to bring about many operational benefits. These include:
- providing the real-time train arrival data for their passenger information systems at all stations;
- automated acquisition of previously manually collected operational data – providing information on the daily train-consists plus routes and distance travelled;
Altogether which bring the benefits of increased system efficiency, improved maintenance scheduling and greater levels of customer service through providing the passenger information system with real-time, accurate expected arrival data.
Our innovations have proven to allow us to be able to offer bids that are up to 50% more cost effective than other RTLS solutions for AVL along fixed routes, for parking & garage management systems and for bus arrivals at transit terminals and boarding docks.
Multiple Location Methods
Using a combinations of asset, reference and gatepost tags, gateways and software, RFind’s RTLS can locate a tagged asset in one of 6 key ways (listed from least to most accurate):
- Presence Detection (within range of a Gateway covering a site or area)
- Portal (or Chokepoint) Detection (within range of Gatepost or Gatepost Tag covering a entry or exit point)
- Point to Point Location (tracking an asset from one Reference tag to another, such as along a production line or at maintenance & work stations)
- Zonal Location (locating an asset to a room, area or other space defined by Reference tags placed around it’s perimeter)
- Trilateral Location (locating an asset to a specific X,Y co-ordinate on the map, with an error margin as defined by the system design)
- Slot & Sequence Location (locating an asset, typically a vehicle, to a specific parking bay or ‘slot’ within a lane or set of adjacent parking lanes or lay-down slots)
With RFind & E2D you can mix all the locating types in one system, using the same basic hardware components, making an RFind solution the most cost-effective location system available, pragmatically capable of employing the right type of location methodology at the right points in your enterprise, to meet your needs and budgets.
See what RFind can do for your company. 
An entire RTLS system created from just 3 key components. 
