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Bus Scheduling by Computer Will Come

11th December 1964
Page 38
Page 38, 11th December 1964 — Bus Scheduling by Computer Will Come
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WITHIN 100 man-years or five to seven calendar years of computer development, equipment should be available for programming schedules of vehicles and crews, and it should be possible to " let a computer loose" on a route system to enable all promising combinations of sections to be evaluated. The attempt of Oxford City Transport to schedule buses by computer could not have been successful because the equipment was unsuitable for the job.

These comments were made by Mr. P. A. Losty. lecturer at the Cranfield Work Study School,college of aeronautics, during the discussion on his paper "Computers and transport" presented at a meeting on Tuesday of The Institute of Transport (Midland section) in reply to a question from Mr. N. Rolf, of the Midland Red Company. In a later comment on observations by Mr. T. Hayes, Birmingham City Transport, Mr. Losty agreed that different schedules would be required for the undertaking's 15 garages, but claimed that the information stored by computer could be variously applied to produce alternatives. Reassuring Mr. Hayes regarding. the possibility that the computer would "destroy human interest ", Mr. Losty said that knowledge would always reside in people, but admitted that the fundamental problem was whether civilization should be run by machines.

In a short review of the work of the Midland Red computer, Mr. Rolfe said that developments being considered included the use of an audit roll in the conductors' ticket machines which would make a copy of the tickets; the roll would then be optically scanned to produce a punched paper tape that would be fed into the computer. Also, a tape might be used to record the issue of each ticket, and longer lengths of tape could then be processed by the computer.

After referring in his paper to heuristic, or trial-and-error, solutions that could be provided by a . computer, and observing that progress would be made towards. programmedsolutions, Mr. Losty said that simulation by computer of a clerks' normal thinking processes (at a much higher speed and with certain accuracy) propably represented the most useful practical contribution to efficiency that computers could now make. All undertakings could solve their own problems without a computer if they had the time and the facilities.


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