Al-Hady: Qatari Students Chart the Course |
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As the first rays of sunlight hit the desert dunes
extinguishing the darkened shadows with a distinct rainbow
of tawny hues, a minaret echoes the Mo'athen's call to
prayer, signaling the beginning of another day in this
desert state. Somewhere in Doha, the capital city of Qatar,
Rashed Salem Ali begins the day by answering the call to
prayer before preparing to head to school.
The school bus arrives promptly at 6:47 a.m. as it does everyday. Rashed greets the driver with the traditional, "As Salaam A'alaikum" and boards the bus, smiling all the while, satisfied in the knowledge that he together with seven other Qatari high school students had a role to play in ensuring that the city's school buses run efficiently and on time.
Last summer The Centre for GIS in conjunction with the Ministry of Education and CED Roads Division GIS units, launched a program to introduce GIS technology to high school students by exposing them to its benefits and uses in every day life. Eight high school students from various Qatari public schools were chosen by the Ministry of Education to participate in this exercise.
One of the main objectives of the project was to convey to the students how GIS technology can be used in their daily lives. Thus a project that communicated the objectives in a participatory manner and one that the students could relate to was needed. Since a large number of students utilize the school bus system, and the fact that such systems can be modeled effectively by a GIS, a school bus routing decision support system was the ideal project. The driving principal of the project was to impart proper training to the students thus enabling them to become active participants throughout the life cycle of the project.
The students began by receiving detailed briefings on the project and its objectives. Foremost, they were trained for one month in the fundamentals of GIS and taught how to use ArcView, a Windows-based GIS application. Particular emphasis was given to ArcView's Networking Module that was central to the application to be developed. Three of the students were given further training on this module, raising their level of expertise significantly.
Two schools, Khalid Bin Al Waleed Model School and Al Rayyan Al Jadeed Boys Elementary School, were chosen to participate in the project. All data required for the project was collected by the students who were trained to use GPS units. The routes used by the buses servicing these schools were recorded using these units. This data would be used later in the project to perform comparative analyses. The students then began field data collection within the catchment areas of the schools to gather traffic data such as turning movements, traffic volumes, relative impedances at major intersection, and so forth to enable them to model the road network as closely as possible.
As the data collection stage of the project came to an end, plans were finalized to develop the decision support system that would make optimal use of the transportation resources available in an easy and efficient manner. A bus routing decision support system using ArcView was developed in conjunction with technical staff at the Centre for GIS. The objective was to allow an administrator to have the flexibility to alter various parameters such as the number of drivers or buses, bus capacity, number and location of stops, road closures and diversions; and let the system automatically generate the most efficient routes taking all the above parameters into consideration. This would ensure that each bus was optimally utilized as the system automatically determined the shortest route for each bus. The system also had to ensure that the number of students were evenly spread between various buses thus distributing the workload equally among drivers.
The flexibility of such a system also ensured that situations where a driver was absent or a bus broke down, were resolved instantly by entering the correct parameters enabling the system to automatically re-generate the bus routes using the reduced resources. Thus it ensured that an administrator would never again have to manually figure out how to re-route buses in such circumstances. It also accommodated new drivers by generating precise directions for new drivers who were unfamiliar with their routes.
The result of the above development process is called "Al Hady" or The Pathfinder. A fully customized school bus routing decision support system that enables administrators to instantly change various parameters depending on the situation at hand and generate routes on the fly. To demonstrate the effectiveness of Al Hady, the existing routes from the two schools were loaded into the system. Without any changes to the location or number of stops, Al Hady was used to regenerate the same routes in the best possible way. Results showed that the new routes were definitely more efficient. Further when Al Hady was used to re-distribute the stops among the various buses, and then generate the new routes, the route efficiency was improved even more.
In keeping with the objectives of the project, students tested Al-Hady and made key recommendations that were incorporated into the system. The students put their newly gained knowledge to the test when they demonstrated the system over a three day period at the recently held GIS/GPS Conference. Commented one of them, "It was incredible to be a part of such a project. It enabled me to experience first hand how GIS technology can be used to solve real day-today problems."
In recognition of their tremendous efforts, the students were also given an opportunity to showcase their work at the conference's plenary session. They were also awarded with gifts by the Centre for GIS to commend them for their hard work and enthusiasm! On a personal note, it was a breath of fresh air to work with such young minds. From day one their enthusiasm and commitment to the project ensured its success. My congratulations to them all!