A Highly Available GTFS-RT Positions System

TL;DR

This paper presents a highly available system for real-time public transit positioning using GTFS-RT, detailing hardware, algorithms, and deployment strategies to ensure continuous data availability across regions.

Contribution

It introduces a novel system architecture combining GPS sensors, data translation algorithms, and a multi-region deployment for high availability of GTFS-RT transit data.

Findings

Achieved high system availability across multiple regions.

Developed algorithms for translating raw GPS data into GTFS-RT format.

Designed a hardware and software stack for real-time transit positioning.

Abstract

We develop a system for real-time public transportation data, deciding to use the data standard GTFS-RT (GTFS Realtime), an open data format for public transit data. We give an overview of the design of a physical GPS sensor device, its firmware, and processes. Next, we give the algorithms used to translate raw sensor data into a public GTFS-RT data feed. We deploy this feed over a highly available cluster across multiple regions to maintain high availability.