SMARTBRT, A NEW SIMULATION TOOL TO ASSESS BUS RAPID TRANSIT SYSTEMS

The authors report results of a two-year project to develop a bus rapid transit (BRT) operation and infrastructure concept computer simulation, evaluation and visualization tool, SmartBRT. SmartBRT was developed to aid in planning and evaluating new or existing infrastructure and operation concepts, deployment stages of BRT and in communicating these concepts or stages through visualization. The authors present the goals and scope of the tool, its architecture, and details of its three building blocks: simulation, user interface for input and output evaluation, and visualization. While the paper focuses on the SmartBRT tool, it also presents the results of the preliminary analysis of the case study site in order to show the usefulness and capabilities of the tool. The preliminary analyses represent the capabilities of SmartBRT and the type of analyses it performs