Real-Time Route Alert System

To develop an application that users can use to set and track their destination routes with minimal restrictions and struggle.

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Inspiration

As regular transit riders, we understand the struggles of day-to-day commutes through the public transit systems and how frustrating it can be to have your bus delayed. Under such circumstances, you wouldn't normally be alerted of this situation until it is too late. We wanted to build an application that can help alleviate these struggles and frustrating circumstances by alerting the user in real-time of current delayed systems.

What it does

Whenever one of the transit routes have been delayed, an alert notification will be indicated at the top of the screen suggesting that the user look through the Suggested Routes tab for alternative routes to their destination. At this moment, it isn't completely dynamic as it only utilizes the pre-determined transit routes without allowing for user input on a specific destination.

How we built it

We utilized WPF .Net Framework with Visual Studio Enterprise 2022 and utilized the provided open source data from Durham Region Transit (such as GTFS-RT Trip Updates, Transit Routes, and GTFS Static Schedule). Alongside these provided resources, we also utilized packages such as GMap.Net for the map configuration and Protobuf to gather the real-time data from DRT's open sources. This entire project was made mostly using C# programming language and XAML for the user interface.

Challenges we ran into

One of the biggest challenges we had during this Hackathon was what exactly we wanted to do for the project submission. Coming into the event, we were severely under-prepared and didn't feel like we would be able to make a submission by the end of it. Some other major issues we encountered were a series of bugs, issues with code, Git challenges (such as merge conflicts and issues pulling branches), etc. By the end, our main concern was to have something feasible to submit for the deadline (including this project detail document)

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud that we have something that we are proud of to submit even if it wasn't what we expected at the beginning of the event. Something else we were able to accomplish was mapping route stops correctly onto the GMap interface.

What we learned

Of course, we learned how to use DRT's open source data systems as well as other systems such as GTFS's real time data structure, protobuffer, map integration, plot pointing, parsing data, GitHub/Git.

What's next for Real-Time Route Alert System

It would be nice to allow users to dynamically insert their preferred location rather than being forced to select preset transit routes that do not lead anywhere close to their destination. If given the chance to scale this project further, we would also like to have the Suggested Routes tab also be dynamic in the sense that it will automatically update based on delays, road closures, accidents, etc. in real time rather than being a static dataset.

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