It is now necessary for most UK bus operators to provide Automatic Vehicle Location (AVL) Feed in order to meet the requirements of Bus Open Data.

Until recently this could only be done using expensive electronic ticket machines with significant purchase and ongoing costs or by using dedicated hardware in the bus. But Ezi-AVL now provides the option of sending your AVL feed from an android mobile phone.

As long as you have an android mobile phone Ezi-AVL allows you to fulfull your AVL requirements in any vehicle. You just select the trip that you're driving on the mobile app and drive! The phone will send the trip details that we need and will send GPS data as you drive. Our servers then convert this information into the transxchange format and send it out as a BODS AVL Feed.

The information we need comes from the timetables files that you (or perhaps your agent) have dutifully prepared and uploaded for Bus Open Data. If you haven't done this yet do not panic as we can probably help you there too! Anyway, the timetable files and the GPS readings from your phone give us all everything needed to produce your BODS AVL feed. It really is pretty easy!

To meet the AVL requirements we only need to know about the start of the journey and then GPS readings as the trip progresses. But as your phone now knows about the trip, and about the stops and the stop times we can report useful things to the driver like early/late running, expected departure times etc. This makes adhering to the timetable easy.