Public Transit Wide Area Monitoring & Control

Public transit systems have auxiliary equipment across their entire region, in locations difficult to access. Communications infrastructure is heterogeneous, of tenuous stability, often antiquated, and underground. Through these obstacles we brought a crucial centralized system view to their personnel and riders.

As lead software architect/developer, I worked closely with customer stakeholders, infrastructure personnel, hardware designers, installation/field engineers, and contributing software developers.

Field units physically adjacent to the equipment connect to central servers to report status or receive commands. The local communication link to the equipment is typically a proprietary API or Modbus, over UART, UDP, or TCP/IP. Field units connected with central servers via TCP/IP. Field units are Beaglebone Debian Linux devices running Python.

Central server components were developed in Python on Win32 servers, which passed status to the public transit system’s servers for consumption via their proprietary APIs.