Teltronic terminals on Barcelona buses

Transports Metropolitans de Barcelona (TMB) plans to expand its fleet of buses with Teltronic onboard terminals.

Teltronic will be responsible for supplying the equipment of radiocommunications for the new vehicles.

The equipment is embedded in a rack specially designed to be installed on buses. The 84 new units are added to those already in operation, so Teltronic is equipping the nearly 1200 buses that comprise the fleet of Barcelona, with almost 100 lines in operation.

Teltronic was previously selected by TMB to supply a TETRA communications network that could provide service to the bus network. The deployment of its NEBULA infrastructure consisted of a network control node and repeater base stations that allow full coverage of the city.

One of the main strengths of the system is that it allows the updating of the position of the entire fleet in only 20 seconds. This is possible because the positioning data of each vehicle is sent to the control centre through the intelligent application SDM (synchronous data manager), Teltronic patent, which is characterised by offering minimum refresh times, avoiding network overloads.

Thus, with the positioning data received, the control centre can inform passengers in real time about the status of the journey, arrival times or incidents; visualise the current position of the vehicles and monitor the status of all of them; and calculate the gap between the marked schedule and the one actually carried by the vehicles so that the operator can make different actions to maintain scheduled services: introduce or eliminate resources in the lines, and send instructions to the driver to increase or decrease the speed.

The collaboration between TMB and Teltronic is also extended to suburban transport, since the company was responsible for the TETRA communication system in line 9 of the Barcelona Metro. With automatic driverless trains, this requires data capacity and is able to manage the commands sent to and from the control centre, which remotely controls the operation of the trains.

For this project, Teltronic also deployed the infrastructure consisting of several base stations that guarantee full coverage along the line (tunnels and passenger stations) and terminals on board the trains that were specially designed to comply with the railway regulations.

Image credit: ©stock.adobe.com/au/Janis Smits

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