Team

 Louis Berghold

Louis Profile Pic

  • Louis’s involvement with the Intelligent Transport Systems started as an undergraduate when he delivered, as part of his Thesis, the very first electronic Bus Passenger Information System for the Northern Beaches in 1999. This sparked his passion for ITS and the benefits they provide to the community.
  • A member of the PTIPS Management Team, Louis has contracted to the RTA/RMS/TfNSW for a total of 16 years on various high profile projects, including SCATS, the TMC’s Live Traffic Website and as Development Manager and Architect of PTIPS from before the start of the Ministry’s of Transport’s involvement in 2005.
  • Louis’ role on the PTIPS project was key to transforming the former research project into a successful and critical production system tracking the entire Sydney Metropolitan bus fleet and delivering real value to commuters, bus operators, and TfNSW where it is used to manage $2.1b worth of Bus Services Contracts.
  • Working closely with the Customer Experience Division of TfNSW, the PTIPS team, and third party app developers in 2012 he was critical in delivering the real-time bus passenger information for smartphone apps under TfNSW’s quick wins program. He also subsequently aided Sydney Trains in delivering their own equivalent program.
  • In 2013 Louis was presented with the Team of the Year award at the inaugural TfSNW staff awards. Louis has previously received a High Performance award from the RTA in 2010 for managing the development team of another critical project.
  • Louis also co-authored a paper with Ghassan Jarjees on the economic benefits of PTIPS that was presented to the ITS World Congress 2012.

Ghassan Jarjees

GJ_Profile

  • A combination of strong academic background, high engineering and software development skills, a degree in economics, and a passion for efficient transport and traffic systems allowed Dr. Jarjees to be at the centre of a number of significant Intelligent Transport Systems initiatives.
  • The origins of the Public Transport Information and Priority System, PTIPS, can be traced back to his Ph.D. thesis, a joint venture research project between the Roads and Traffic Authority (RTA) of NSW (now the Roads and Maritime Services, RMS) and the University of Technology, Sydney in the late 1990s. After moving to the RTA in 1999, Dr. Jarjees developed a prototype of PTIPS that was trialled on the Airport Express Services and the Route 400 between Bondi and Burwood. With the contribution of highly qualified individuals, most notably Louis Berghold and Peter Su (of Prioritize), PTIPS grew into a fully functional system tracking over 5000 buses in NSW providing real value to authorities and operators through real time and historic performance reporting, to passengers through real time arrival information, and signal priority aimed at reducing delays at signalised intersections thereby enhancing schedule adherence. Besides providing the philosophical underpinnings of the algorithms and concepts in PTIPS, Dr. Jarjees was also involved in all aspects of the development including analysis, design, coding, testing and trialling.
  • In 2010, Dr. Jarjees was awarded the RTA’s Network Management Staff Award for Innovation in recognition of his significant contribution to the PTIPS project.
  • In 2011-2012, Dr. Jarjees carried out a comprehensive economic assessment of the benefits of PTIPS by applying existing as well as proposed economic models. Co-authored by Louis Berghold (of Prioritize) and Andrew Mehaffey (of RTA), the findings of this study were published at the 2012 ITS World Congress in Vienna, Austria.
  • Ghassan is currently involved in developing a tool for assessing the coordination performance of the Sydney Coordinated Adaptive Traffic System, SCATS. The work is being carried by Prioritize for the Roads and Maritime Services of NSW. His other professional interests include simulation modelling of transport networks, traffic control, and the emerging field of Big Data especially in relation to traffic and transport.

Peter Su

PS_Profile

  • Peter originally joined the PTIPS project to develop a user interface for the system.  His eventual role would see him wearing many different hats from requirements gathering, testing, performance tuning, release management, database administration and UI design and implementation.
  • Peter worked closely with Ghassan and Louis to design and develop the PTIPS system, and was instrumental in the development of the PTIPS user interface that is used by over 30 bus service companies to track and manage their bus fleets.
  • Peter developed the software interface (using the GTFS standard) that provides real time public transport updates to millions of commuters daily through smartphones apps such as TripView. He also developed the previous highly successful SMS service (0488 TXT BUS) for public transport updates, responding to hundreds of thousands of requests monthly.
  • Peter continued to lead the technical advancements to the PTIPS UI, including the rewrite of the UI as a cloud-enabled web application.