Public transport (PT) plays a vital role in commuting billions of travellers in cities all over the world, providing a mode that is both sustainable and accessible. Metro networks are especially apt at this considering their high-capacity and high-speed operation in urban environments. Comparing different metro networks to one another is a suitable manner for transport planners to gain insights into the characteristics of their networks and which areas of improvement exist. In the field of network science, metro networks have been studied extensively in recent decades. While this provided many new insights in the field of network science, the practical relevance for the field of transport science often remained limited. This limited relevance is primarily caused by the lack of realism of the network representations used, not incorporating the actual operation and service that the network provides. As such, this study proposes a comprehensive comparison of metro networks worldwide including service information. This comparison study includes service characteristics in the form of the total travel time indicator for shortest path calculations, which is a combination of the in-vehicle time, waiting time and number of transfers. The median of this total travel time is taken for each network and compared to that of other networks. This metric in turn is contrasted with network- and city-related characteristics in order to explore relations between these factors and to explain the patterns discovered. From this analysis, it is revealed that the travel time increases with network size. The indicator that is especially apt at explaining the differences in total travel time between networks is the number of stations combined with the average direct station distance. The total travel time methodology applied in this study shows significantly different results to other commonly used methods that rely only on in-vehicle time or hops to calculate shortest path travel times. The waiting time turns out to be the main contributor to these significant differences. Future studies can expand on this by considering other network science indicators and looking further into local indicators. In addition, the methodology could be expanded with more detailed transfer information and other PT modes. ... Read more

Team Sunweb, a professional cycling team and our client, is constantly looking for innovations to help them win races. They tasked us with creating an application which could assist coaches with determining the strategy during a race. This application, which we dubbed TelaSol, is supposed to run on a tablet that is mounted on the dashboard inside the coach car. For this project we developed an application that allows races to be prepared on a desktop computer and tracked during a race on a tablet-optimized interactive dashboard. On this dashboard, there will be information on the riders, the route and comments that can be added before the race.

During development we have considered existing solutions, relevant literature and useful technologies to get an idea of what was possible and how we could achieve our goal. We used this knowledge to create our initial set of requirements. We then proceeded development of application using an agile approach, which involves regular feedback moments from our client to update the requirements and adjust our focus accordingly. To verify the quality of our product we relied on a combination of automated tests, user testing and validation through the client.

Initially the application was supposed to integrate live data coming from the riders during the race, but due to a regulation change we had to change our focus. Instead, we focused primarily on creating the application for playback purposes, while still keeping it adaptable to live data. The application performs the main tasks that were initially defined properly. After further development on live data and extensive situational testing, the app can be used to its full potential. Using TelaSol, Team Sunweb will improve their ability to analyze races and increase their chances of winning.
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