[caption id="attachment_3614" align="alignleft" width="300"]

UrbComp students Bryse Flowers (left) and Farnaz Khaghani were on the student team working with WMATA. Behind them is Brian Mayer, project manager and research scientist at the Discovery Analytics Center, who oversaw the study.[/caption] Last fall, the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) struck a partnership with Virginia Tech’s graduate program in urban computing for help in predicting its system’s on-time performance (OTP). The resulting study, by a team of students enrolled in Introduction to Urban Computing, a computer science course in the

UrbComp certificate program

administered by the

Discovery Analytics Center

, is one of the first steps in connecting WMATA’s Rush Hour Promise -- initiated in January 2018 to provide a refund to any customer delayed by 15 minutes or more during rush hour -- to underlying service disruptions, according to Jordan Holt, senior performance analyst at WMATA.  Click

here

to read more about the collaboration.