Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Department

Mechanical and Thermal Measurements Group

Public Transport Comfort

Recently, the problem to estimate comfort associated with vibrations has been put in evidence, with particular attention about infrastructure-vehicle interactions. One of the aims of this work is to evaluate the effects of traffic calming devices on the passengers of public and/or private transports by vibration measurements.

a comfort index plot over a transit route in Brescia - Italy

A self-sufficient measurement system has been implemented: it links each measurement with a geographical information resulting from a Global Positioning System (GPS), and produces a set of comfort indexes directly, using a Geographic Information System (GIS) to plot thematic maps allowing for a quick overview of the comfort along a particular route or in a defined area.
The prototype system actually in use is based on widely used hardware components, i.e. a laptop computer, a commercial GPS receiver and a set of servo-accelerometers, although a compact standalone industrial system is being developed for integration in local transport services.
All data acquired by the travelling system, which runs a custom made software, is collected in a database remotely accessible, for standard and geographic querying and analysis by more specialists, and it has been designed explicitly to handle large data set, in order to create a statistically robust evaluation of local comfort.