In Quebec, Canada, the safety and mobility for the staff and patrons of Reseau de transport de Longueui, the City of Longueuil’s transport corporation are  enhanced with Tait DMR Tier 3 and Omnitronics’ ‘omnicore’ communication solutions, featuring Dynamic Regrouping. 

Reseau de transport de Longueui (RTL) is the City of Longueuil’s key transit corporation operates bus services, shared taxi services and paratransit to commuter across the five cities in Quebec, Canada.

RTL’s fleet of 600 buses operates from 2 hangars that needed to upgrade their radios and dispatch management system as the existing custom developed system that has served them for 25+ years has become End of Life.

The Challenge

The organization’s streamlined processes meant that their new communications solution needed to fulfill very specific industry requirements such as those outlined by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). In addition, the capability to fully customize a dispatch system for organizational processes is not commonly offered by major dispatch console manufacturers.

Business Needs & Requirements

RTL were looking to integrate intelligence from their existing custom developed transport activity management system to deliver invaluable driver and vehicle data directly to console operators with upgrades every minute.

Moreover, a highly advanced Call Queue functionality and the ability to dynamically create radio talk groups on a Tait DMR Tier 3 radio system were further requirements.

The Solution

Dispatch operators for RTL not only manage communications for their fleet of 600 buses, but also with supervisors on the road, maintenance personnel, as well as security across the city’s bus network.

Dynamic Regrouping, or the ability for console operators to easily and quickly setup contacts groups “on the fly”, is a functionality commonly required by the transport industry. Console Operators can easily make calls to drivers in talk groups that are allocated dynamically from the dispatch center rather than having to be pre-programmed within the radio. This functionality makes it easy for the operators to group radio users together “on-the-fly”, whilst allowing the creation of temporary ad-hoc groups as well as mega-groups consisting of multiple talkgroups.

Tait and Omnitronics worked together to develop Dynamic Regrouping on both the radio and the console side for the benefit of CLR and future Tait and Omnitronics users offering transportation services.

The solution was also  customized to allow RTL to integrate their live data, ‘MOMI’ database to omnicore Enterprise Dispatch. Database changes are updated every 60 seconds and include vital information for each driver contact.

Additional customized features that were developed for RTL also included a specialized Call Queue tied to the Status Messages received from radios in the field, Emergency Call requests and highly specialized Filtering. An important safety measure is the ability for bus drivers to request a callback by means of sending a DMR Radio Status Message to console operators. The assigned level of priority for received status messages can range from a High Priority, i.e. in case of emergency to medium and low priorities like “running late” notifications or advising of traffic problems.

The provision of this real time data, directly to the console operators is both a massive time saver, helps to reduce the possibility for errors during busy or emergency situations and therefore can also assist with the critical task of staff safety.