First Bus and Abellio have installed 21st Century’s Journeo EDGE intelligent gateway on their fleets, which enables them to connect on-board systems to new cloud services.
21st Century describes the EDGE as a “small, intelligent automotive gateway”. When installed, it allows operators remote access to vehicle systems without the need for the vehicle to be present. It handles communication between on-board systems and maintains health checks with components of connected systems such as CCTV digital video recorders (DVRs), cameras, fire suppressant equipment, and vehicle diagnostic information via CANBus.
First is midway through a rollout of the EDGE connecting to the Journeo Transit video and health modules. 2000 of its vehicles already send across CCTV health data, helping the operator to improve its level of successful video downloads.
“Using Journeo Transit, our evidence collection process has become much more efficient, increasing the efficiency and speed with which we can assess and respond to claims, or provide data to third parties, such as the police,” says Head of Insurance at First Bus Michelle Grosvenor. “We have been using the remote health monitoring for some time now and seen it increase download availability substantially, so we are now in a position that we have more evidence available and are able to access it faster.”
Meanwhile, Abellio has extended Journeo Transit across its fleet after successful implementation of the solution on its New Routemaster buses last year.
Journeo allows Abellio to track the location of its ancillary fleet of Ferry Cars and engineering vans, check the health of on-board CCTV systems and request videos. A pair of HD cameras provide a view of the road ahead and within the vehicle. The tracking allows Abellio to see the location of vehicles in real time.
“Staff and customer safety has never been more important than it has in the last year, so by using the Journeo Transit portal to work remotely, we have been able to maintain social distancing rules while keeping our systems operational,” says Adam Shellard-Dedman, Operational Safety Manager of Abellio. “This assisted our CCTV analysts to work safely throughout the pandemic; accessing, previewing across our estate of digital video recorders from multiple manufacturers and distributing vital CCTV evidence without having to visit the vehicle.
“When the opportunity arose to extend the roll out so that more of our vehicles could benefit from the system, we were excited at the prospect of managing all our security systems, no matter the original manufacturer, from a single and secure online platform.”
