Construction of a Regional Public Transportation Management Support System Using the Cloud

Public transportation is an indispensable part of residents’ daily lives, including commuting, shopping, and hospital visits. Our research group provides support activities for regional public transportation systems, mainly for community buses operated by local governments. The primary support services include the development of the General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS), bus location that displays the location of buses on a map, and the measurement of the number of passengers. We are supporting the DX of regional public transportation by constructing and providing an infrastructure system to realize these services. Until now, the infrastructure system was built on a server in a university laboratory to provide these services. However, the service was often interrupted due to power outages for legal inspections several times a year and network failures within the university, resulting in constant complaints from the regional public transportation operators they support. The conversion of the infrastructure system to the cloud solves these problems. A comparison of communication speeds showed that the on-premise environment was faster. However, by converting the infrastructure system to AWS, the security risk of converting their servers and the risk of power outages due to legal inspections can be reduced or eliminated, so these speed differences are considered acceptable.