Vehicle monitoring feeds can be managed within the “Network” → “Vehicles” → “Vehicle monitoring subscriptions” section of Passenger Cloud. 

When a supplier provides details of a SIRI-VM feed to Passenger, we create a subscription to this feed - this essentially asks the supplier to send Passenger the relevant vehicle data at a certain interval.

The exact configuration of the subscription depends on the supplier and customer requirements. 

Managing a subscription 

The “Vehicle monitoring subscriptions” section lists all active subscriptions, you can view details of and manage a specific subscription by clicking on the subscription.

This page is broken down into 3 sections. 

Configuration

This section shows the configuration of the subscription - these are the details sent in the subscription request to the SIRI supplier.

The optimum configuration depends on what the SIRI supplier supports, and how the data pipeline is setup (e.g. from the ticketing machine through to Passenger) - our ideal state is: 

  • Update interval - 5 seconds
  • Incremental updates - enabled
  • Detail level - calls  
  • Update interval - how often the supplier sends data to Passenger
  • URL - the URL that Passenger uses to establish a subscription
  • Strict matching - Whether the vehicle activity’s operator code must match the operator code of a line
  • Requestor reference - an arbitrary reference used to identify the requestor
  • Operator reference - the reference used to request a specific operator’s data from the SIRI supplier, this is an optional filter specific to Ticketer.
  • Vehicle monitoring reference - an arbitrary reference used to request a subset of data from the SIRI supplier
  • Detail level - the requested level of detail to be sent from the SIRI supplier
  • Supplier - details who provides the SIRI-VM feed to Passenger
  • Incremental updates - Whether each payload from the SIRI supplier should contain data for the entire network at that time, or all incremental updates between now and the last payload.
  • Username - the username we use to authenticate to the SIRI supplier

Status 

This section lists the current status of the subscription: 

  • Last seen - when we last received any data from the SIRI supplier
  • Last matched - when we last matched any vehicle activity from the SIRI feed to the lines defined in the “Network” → “Lines” section, populated from TransXChange
  • Last updated - when the configuration was last updated
  • Matched vehicle activity - the number of active vehicle activity elements that we were successfully able to match to a line. These vehicles will appear in the “Vehicles” section, apps and websites.
  • Unmatched vehicle activity - the number of active vehicle activity elements that we were not able to match to a line, these vehicles will not appear in the “Vehicles” section, apps or websites.

Resubscribing to the feed will often resolve data transmission issues - you can do this by clicking the “Resubscribe” button. If you’ve made changes at your SIRI supplier you often need to re-subscribe to pick up those changes.

Using these details it is possible to easily identify large issues with SIRI feeds, for example:

If the “Last seen” field is significantly different from the update interval, your supplier may be having issues providing data reliably.

Your SIRI supplier may not sending vehicle activity data, this can be resolved by one of the following:

  1. Resubscribing via the process outlined above may resume data transmission.
    1. Contact your SIRI supplier to enquire why Passenger cannot match any vehicle activity data.
      1. If the “Last matched” field is significantly different from the update interval:
    2. Your SIRI supplier may not sending vehicle activity data, this can be resolved by one of the following:
  2. Resubscribing via the process outlined above may resume data transmission.
    1. Contact your SIRI supplier to enquire why Passenger cannot match any vehicle activity data.
    2. The vehicle activity is not correctly matching with lines from the “Network” → “Lines” section of Passenger Cloud, populated via TransXChange datasets. this can be identified by using the “Vehicle Activity” section below.

Continue to the next article on Managing real-time vehicle data: Managing vehicle activity.