What will the future of sustainable mobility look like?
Meet Éric Barbereau, Head of Marketing, Customer Experience and Training at Systrans. He sheds light on the solutions developed by this Equans entity to meet the challenges of buses, trains and streetcars.
What are Systrans' missions?
Systrans is a subsidiary of Equans, a world leader in intelligent transport systems and services.
Our job is to provide public transport operators with a tool for supervising their network. It enables them to manage the network on a day-to-day basis: in terms of fleet, driving agents, schedules, compliance with the theoretical offers they have to provide to their customers.
Systrans therefore offers a whole ecosystem of solutions to make transport smarter and smoother. Among these solutions is Navineo.
What is Navineo and what does it do?
Navineo is a generic name that covers all our operating assistance and passenger information system solutions.
Today, we're able to supply virtually any operating system, any system operator, be it bus, streetcar or train, from an operator with just 10 vehicles to one with 10,000.
Navineo refers to these different systems which share the same base, but are adapted to different volumes. Navineo covers all operating and passenger information systems.
In 2025, a new roadmap has been launched: Road to Innovation. What does it contain?
It's an ambitious project to make public transport more sustainable, more comfortable and more efficient. A concrete example: the operation of electric buses.
The range of an electric bus is a bit like the battery level of a telephone. But unlike our cell phone, a bus can't be plugged in just anywhere. So you have to plan, organize and, above all, avoid running out of power in the middle of a route. The worry is that the autonomy advertised by manufacturers is often over-optimistic: perfect weather, not too many passengers, no traffic jams or hills to climb... In real life, it's cold, it's raining, the heating is running, the bus is full.
Result: the battery melts faster. And if you're not careful, you run the risk of breakdowns and delays for your passengers. Systrans has developed tailor-made features to solve this problem.
How do you respond in concrete terms?
We are currently working on machine learning applied to electric buses. With artificial intelligence to improve prediction of achievable distances according to load, weather, network topology (uphill, downhill...).
These data are historized to produce reliable predictions. This ensures that the operator is not caught unprepared when operating his fleet of electric vehicles. With this intelligent network management system, the transport authority has permanent visibility over the level of autonomy of its vehicles, whether they are in the depot or on the road.
Road to innovation also includes interface redesign. Why do we do this?
The idea is to make Navineo screens clearer and more intuitive. For more efficient operation, the operator can see at a glance the number of passengers, transport punctuality, or traffic disruptions.
And to top it all off, Navineo offers a new feature to help field teams in real time: agent recovery management. This is a brand-new function, useful in the event of network degradation. When everything's going well, the transport offer provides for bus rotations all day long on the lines, with agents following one another in the vehicles at the rhythm of "relèves".
But when there's a deterioration on the network, and a bus or streetcar can no longer get from point A to point B, the whole schedule is turned upside down. Drivers stay in their vehicles, waiting to be relieved. So replacements have to be found.
With this function in Navineo, it's possible to put the right agents in the right place, even in a degraded situation. The system will automatically say: "At the moment, I have such-and-such an agent in such-and-such a vehicle", and suggest the optimal place to make the exchange, and put the right agents in the right vehicles.
What is Navineo Lab?
We have launched Navineo Lab, a set of research projects that push the boundaries of mobility by integrating cutting-edge technologies with intelligent transportation systems.
Navineo Lab is about looking at what's new in technology to see how we can integrate it into our systems, to be more efficient and give our users more possibilities or facilities, to move faster towards a result when faced with a problem.
It's about being able to go out and test with our users, directly on site, to see in real life how things work. It also means working with academics, entrusting them with reflection projects, so that they can start digging into certain points that can then be useful to us and enable us to further improve our systems.
Faced with the need to manage a growing number of agents in the field, reliable and secure communications are essential. That's why Navineo lab relies on the best radio communication standards, to guarantee smooth transmission of information. A major advantage in a context where coordination and speed of action make all the difference.
Communications security is also a major issue, isn't it?
Yes, and that's why we're working with the MCPTT standard, a private security radio solution, with encrypted communications, that can be entirely dedicated to transport operators. Network providers, such as Bouygues or Orange, can allocate channels to transport operators to use this new generation of radio, which is now very popular and widely used, typically by law enforcement agencies. It is considered a tamper-proof radio.
Autonomous vehicles are already shaping the future of transport. Where do you stand on this subject at Systrans?
Something very important we're working on is autonomous transport. It seems a bit remote to some. Autonomous transport means driverless vehicles. We're familiar with them in the Île-de-France region with automatic metros, but today we're also talking about driverless road vehicles.
Tests are being carried out, and our challenge is to know how to manage them with an operating assistance system.
Having all the advantages of a public transport network, but with autonomous vehicles. It seemed a long way off to us too... but when we talk to our customers, we realize that it's just around the corner.
And that's why we're quite proud to be ahead of the game on this subject, and to know today how to almost fully integrate autonomous vehicles into our operating system.
What motivates you in your day-to-day work at Systrans?
What makes me happy to get up in the morning to go to work is that at Systrans, we listen to operators. We don't innovate to please ourselves, we really try to meet their expectations, to create efficient tools that will make their lives easier to manage buses, streetcars, trains, boats, bicycles, etc.
And that's what's so exciting. We're not in the virtual or in the third dimension. We're in contact with reality, in contact with public transport professionals, and we're doing everything we can to meet their expectations.
