School Bus Routing, School Transportation Software, Special Needs Routing, School Bus Tracker

Compass - School Bus Routing Software

Compass is the first web-based routing solution that has been built on the widely known and accepted standard ESRI ArcGIS Server technology. Mapping, routing, spatial analytic features of the Compass software leverage core ESRI GIS technology such as ArcGIS Server, Network Analyst, Shapefiles and Geodatabases.

Compass is a full-fledged K-12 Routing and Transportation Information Management solution. Anyone involved in School Bus operations knows the effort and complexity of planning routes and keeping up with changes to routes and stops throughout the academic year. Traditionally districts have used paper maps and push pins to manually plan routes. Over the years products have come out that let routers do on the computer what they were doing on paper. While these products allowed representation of paper data on the computers, there was a lot lacking in terms of doing actual computerized routing, requiring the user to still plan the route just as they did on paper.

Compass has been built with the objective of taking K-12 routing to the much needed next level involving use of software intelligence and automated decision processing to produce efficient routes. Compass is designed to reduce the tedium and manual effort that goes into route designing. Compass does the actual work of planning and optimizing routes based on a variety of parameters such as bus capacities, special equipment needs, ride time, mileage, school bell times etc. Compass uses powerful mathematical models to produce routes that are efficient and can help reduce overall mileage driven, ride time and in many cases even the number of buses needed to efficiently transport students. In situations where constraints such as total students to be transported, transit time and bell time requirements cannot be met with a given fleet size, Compass provides information to route planners using which the district can determine necessary fleet expansion.

Whether a school district is interested in improving the efficiency of its existing fleet routing and reducing fleet size or if the district is looking for data to assist it with expanding its fleet, Compass is the ideal and easy to use software tool for such tasks.

Compass is a an operational tool in that it is ideal for day to day route management and at the same time it is a strong planning tool letting districts experiment with various “what-if” type scenarios by varying parameters such as bell times, number of buses etc. to view the impact on routing.

Optional GPS Vehicle Tracking is also available.

Web Browser Based

Compass is a true Web Browser routing solution. There is no need to install any special software on district work stations. Compass is installed on a server and users simply access it (with proper security privileges) using a Web Browser like Internet Explorer or Firefox etc.

True Optimization

Compass does far more than just find the shortest path between a given set of stops. If a district has (for example) 1000 bus stops and fleet of (say) 200 buses, Compass can take that information, combine it with student rider counts and generate routes for each bus in the fleet. It may be that Compass may not need to use all 200 buses to route through all the stops and if that is the case it will let the router know what vehicles were not used. Compass does not require the router to have to sift through the 1000 bus stops and place each stop on a route or bus. Requiring a router to have to pick the stops for a route would be the same as doing routing using a paper map and push pins (with the only added possible benefit being generation of the shortest path between the stops after the router has themselves gone through the effort of having to determine what stops make up a route.) Compass does not require the user to build one route at a time. Compass actually figures out the most efficient grouping of stops into multiple runs and routes. Of course Compass does support the ability for the router to make changes to stop assignments and sequencing, if needed, after the optimized routes have been created by the software. The key value that Compass brings is the fact that it presents the router with a complete optimized set of routes to start with and then adjust as needed.

ESRI Technology Based

Compass is built on the world famous ESRI ArcGIS Server Technology and US Computing is an authorized ESRI business partner. ESRI is the world leader when it comes to GIS and Mapping technologies. In developing the Compass product, US Computing has fully leveraged the power and flexibility of the ESRI platform. Majority of Federal, State, County and City government agencies use ESRI technology for their mapping needs. What this means, is that any district using Compass would be easily able to share information with their local government departments, such as E911 or Tax Map office that may also be using ESRI technologies and tools (such as ArcView and ArcGIS Server etc.).