Transit Operations Analytics System

The municipal public transport department at one of the biggest cities in Central America.

Timely transportation is essential for all cities. Especially when we talk about areas as densely populated as Mexico City, with a population of more than 20 million people, including the suburbs.

The Mexican government licenses private bus companies to provide quality transportation services to the capital’s citizens and guests, so the local public transport department signs a Service Level Agreement (SLA) with each vendor. The SLA specifies time intervals between buses, route duration and more.

The client contacted us to develop a system that allows automatically controlling SLA agreement to make public transportation in Mexico City more efficient.

Each public bus in the city has a WiFi device with a set ID to track its position on the route.

The Traffic Monitoring System we built uses the IoT infrastructure with the WiFi device registration sensors that are installed on public roads.

It provides the operational transport control center with easy-to-use visual information about the SLA requirements met for each route.

Our Traffic Monitoring System included:

• Bus routes and schedules builder (more than 400 routes)
• Control panel with information about the SLA requirements met

Our biggest challenge was to process large amounts of data from the sensors: individual sensors transmit new data every 10 seconds, and we had to work on a month’s time span. So, big data storage was developed to consolidate all data from road sensors. The SLA terms were interpreted with numbers.

Data representation was another challenge. Its amounts were larger than a human can supervise, so we implemented hierarchical data representation. It allowed going from a top-level view for months deeper into the details of a selected week or day.

Our platform is designed to help cities like Mexico City, where nearly 400 public bus routes are operated by private companies under government-issued licenses and SLA contracts. These agreements define service frequency (e.g., maximum waiting times between buses), operating hours (e.g., 6:00 AM–1:00 AM), and fleet availability.

The system combines GPS tags on buses with roadside sensors to capture and aggregate operational data in real time. Analytics dashboards highlight SLA compliance and violations, enabling authorities to enforce contracts, apply sanctions, and incentivize better service delivery.

This solution addresses urgent urban mobility challenges. In Mexico City, nearly 50% of daily trips rely on public transport, while congestion costs the economy over 33 billion pesos annually. With ridership growing by almost 8% year-on-year, reliability and accountability are more critical than ever.

By ensuring continuous SLA monitoring and transparent operator performance tracking, the platform provides regulators with actionable insights to improve discipline in public transport operations and, ultimately, enhance passenger experience.