What will the future of sustainable mobility look like?
An interview with Éric Barbereau, Head of Marketing, Customer Experience, and Training at Systrans. He sheds light on the solutions developed by this Equans subsidiary to address the challenges faced by buses, trains, and trams.
What are Systrans's responsibilities?
Systrans is a subsidiary of Equans, a global leader in intelligent transportation systems and services.
Our job is to provide public transit operators with a tool for monitoring their network. It enables them to manage the network on a day-to-day basis—including the fleet, drivers, schedules, and adherence to the service commitments they’ve made to their customers.
Systrans therefore offers a complete ecosystem of solutions to make transportation smarter and more efficient. Among these solutions is the Navineo offering.
What is Navineo, and what is it used for?
Navineo is a generic name that encompasses all of our operations support and passenger information system solutions.
Today, we are able to provide solutions for virtually all operating systems and all transit operators—whether they operate buses, trams, or trains—ranging from operators with as few as 10 vehicles to those with as many as 10,000.
Navineo refers to these various systems, which share the same foundation but are tailored to different scales. Navineo covers the full range of operational support and passenger information systems.
In 2025, a new roadmap was launched: Road to Innovation. What does it include?
This is an ambitious project aimed at making public transportation more sustainable, more comfortable, and more efficient. A concrete example: the use of electric buses.
The range of an electric bus is a bit like a phone’s battery level. But unlike our cell phones, a bus can’t just plug in anywhere. So we have to plan, organize, and above all, make sure it doesn’t break down in the middle of a route. The problem is that the range advertised by manufacturers is often too optimistic: perfect weather, not too many passengers, no traffic jams, and no hills to climb… In real life, it’s cold, it’s raining, the heater is on, and the bus is full.
The result: the battery drains faster. And if you’re not careful, you risk breaking down and making passengers late. Systrans has therefore developed custom features to solve this problem.
How do you address this in practice?
We are currently working on machine learning applied to electric buses. We’re using artificial intelligence to improve predictions of travel distances based on load, weather, and network topology (uphill, downhill, etc.).
This data is logged to generate reliable predictions. This ensures that the operator is not caught off guard when managing its fleet of electric vehicles. With this intelligent network management system, the transit authority has constant visibility into the range of its vehicles, whether they are at the depot or on the road.
"Road to Innovation" also includes a redesign of the user interfaces. Why?
The idea is to make Navineo screens clearer and more intuitive. For more efficient operations, the operator can see passenger volume, transit punctuality, and traffic disruptions at a glance.
And to top it all off, Navineo offers a new feature to assist field teams in real time: agent recovery management. This brand-new feature is particularly useful during network disruptions. When everything is running smoothly, the transit system schedules bus rotations throughout the day on the routes, with agents taking turns on the vehicles according to a “shift” schedule.
But when there’s a disruption on the network, and a bus or tram can no longer travel from point A to point B, the entire schedule is thrown into disarray. Drivers remain in their vehicles, waiting to be relieved. So replacements must be found.
With this feature in Navineo, it’s possible to assign the right drivers to the right locations, even during service disruptions. The system automatically states: “Right now, I have this agent in that vehicle,” and suggests the optimal location for the shift change, ensuring the right agents are assigned to the right vehicles.
What is Navineo Lab?
We have launched Navineo Lab, a series of research projects that push the boundaries of mobility by integrating cutting-edge technologies into intelligent transportation systems.
Navineo Lab means exploring the latest technological innovations to see how we can integrate them into our systems, in order to improve performance and provide our users with more options and convenience, and to find solutions to problems more quickly.
It’s the opportunity to conduct tests with our users, directly on-site, to see how things play out in real life. It also means working with academics, entrusting them with research projects so they can begin to explore certain issues that may later prove useful to us and enable us to further improve our systems.
Given the need to manage a growing number of field agents, reliable and secure communications are essential. That is why Navineo Lab relies on the highest standards in radio communication to ensure the seamless transmission of information. This is 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 transportation operators. Network providers, such as Bouygues or Orange, can allocate channels to transportation operators so they can use this new generation of radio, which is currently in high demand and widely used, typically by law enforcement agencies. This radio system is considered unhackable.
Self-driving vehicles are already shaping the future of transportation. What is Systrans' current status on this issue?
One very important area we’re working on is autonomous transportation. It may seem a bit far-fetched to some. Autonomous transportation refers to driverless vehicles. We’re familiar with them in the Île-de-France region through the automated metro systems, but today we’re also talking about driverless road vehicles.
Tests are being conducted, and our challenge is to figure out how to manage them using an operations support system.
To have all the benefits of a public transit network, but with autonomous vehicles. It seemed very far off to us, too… but when we talk with our customers, we realize it’s coming soon.
And that’s why we’re quite proud to be ahead of the curve on this issue, and to now be able to almost fully integrate autonomous vehicles into our operating system.
What motivates you every day in your job at Systrans?
What makes me happy to get up in the morning and go to work is that at Systrans, we listen to the operators. We don’t innovate just for the sake of it; we really try to meet their expectations and create effective tools that will make their lives easier when managing buses, trams, trains, boats, bicycles, etc.
And that’s what’s so exciting. We’re not dealing with virtual reality or 3D. We’re in touch with reality, in touch with public transportation professionals, and we do everything we can to meet their expectations.
