Megadyne Information Systems

Atlanta

MARTA's Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) together with the Atlanta Showcase were deployed for the 1996 Summer Olympic Games The ITS project included an implementation of Megadyne's PARIS® and PARISpeak® software. These are fully integrated with a geographic information system (GIS), automated transportation management system (ATMS), and automatic vehicle location (AVL) systems. Megadyne's PARISpeak® multilingual capability included English plus four foreign languages. The project was completed on time in July 1996. MARTA (Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority) is Atlanta's public transit system which has been providing bus and rail service to patrons in Fulton and DeKalb counties and the City of Atlanta since 1972. MARTA's more than 700 buses cover 150 routes and 1500 route miles, and operate almost 30 million miles of bus service annually. Its 240 heavy rail cars currently cover 36 stations and over 40 miles, and the first leg of its new North Line opened on June 8, 1996. One of the safest transit system in all of North America, close to 500,000 passengers ride MARTA buses and rail cars every day. The PARIS® implementation in the MARTA ITS provided a client-server architecture running on UNIX platforms from Hewlett-Packard (HP-9000) and uses Sybase as the database management system. Map support is provided using the GDSC GIS. The system is accessed by trained call center information agents using X terminals and by the general public through touch-screen kiosks. PARISpeak® was implemented on a Digital Alpha platform running Digital UNIX, and supports 120 lines using Dialogic voice cards.