My first full day of work at the university, and the first problem I ran into was simply connecting my laptop to the CSE wifi. Turns out I had to have Anat create a guest account for me to sign on since I am neither a student nor faculty. After getting this to work, I went about reading a paper published in 2008 that aimed at making the Minnesota Paratransit System more efficient in it's routing system. Mainly it looked at using algorithms and heuristics to improve the routes that the MM (Metro Mobility) system was already using by cutting down on run times, and it investigated the possible financial benefits that are associated with offering certain passengers non-dedicated vehicle options (i.e. taxis) instead. In addition, today I got a different school issued laptop that actually has Microsoft Access this time, so I was able to actually view the data for the first time today.
At the end of the day I had a meeting with Anat where we discussed what our goal was for me to do in the next week or so. I am going to be creating a table that logs how many bus runs were out on the road at any given hour for any given day. Along with this, we'll probably have three different tables, one for each provider type that the system uses. At first we talked about exporting the data to a csv and using the Python library to do this, but after lots of trouble trying to export all the data to a csv file, Anat suggested that I try to just do it all in Microsoft Access if I knew SQL and thought I might be able to do it that way.
Reading Citation:
Gupta, Diwakar; Chen, Hao-Wei; Miller, Lisa; Surya, Fajarrani. (2008). Improving Capacity Planning for Demand-Responsive Paratransit Services. Minnesota Department of Transportation. Retrieved from the University of Minnesota Digital Conservancy, http://purl.umn.edu/151441.
Reading Citation:
Gupta, Diwakar; Chen, Hao-Wei; Miller, Lisa; Surya, Fajarrani. (2008). Improving Capacity Planning for Demand-Responsive Paratransit Services. Minnesota Department of Transportation. Retrieved from the University of Minnesota Digital Conservancy, http://purl.umn.edu/151441.