The tool will offer transit agencies a free way to simulate and optimize their electric bus fleet transitions

A team of researchers at McMaster University’s Institute for Transportation and Logistics (MITL) is developing an online tool called the e-Transit Orchestrator to support public transit agencies in their shift to battery-electric buses.

The platform will be a free, open-source tool that allows agencies to simulate, test, and optimize electric bus fleet operations based on their specific requirements.

The goal is to make electric bus planning more accessible, data-driven and cost-effective for transit providers of all sizes and types.

“Seventy-five per cent of transit operations in Canada are pretty much one-person operations. They are very small municipalities, scattered, that don’t have the manpower, skills, or resources to hire additional consultants every time they want to plan new services,” says Moataz Mohamed, director of MITL, in an interview with Electric Autonomy.

“If we’re aiming for nationwide electrification, we would like to make the playing field equal. This tool lets smaller municipalities test and configure different solutions to see what might work or not work for them at no cost.”

Using artificial intelligence, the Orchestrator can model variables such as fleet composition, charging infrastructure, route assignments, and energy consumption patterns. At its core is an optimization engine that processes these variables and generates tailored recommendations for each agency’s operational context.

The platform draws on years of validated transportation research and engineering from the MITL researchers, Mohamed says. It delivers strategic insights in minutes and continuously improves as more data is added, producing better and faster results over time

Validating and expanding

The Orchestrator platform is currently a market-ready working prototype, Mohamed notes, and is operating successfully in a lab environment.

MITL has received over $1 million in funding from Natural Resources Canada’s Energy Innovation Program to further expand the project. Over the next four years, the team aims to test and validate the Orchestrator in real-world transit settings, preparing it for launch to a select group of early adopters.

As part of that validation process, MILT is partnering with four transit agencies: Halifax Transit, Calgary Transit, Niagara Region Transit, and the Association du transport urbain du Québec (which represents 10 Quebec urban transit agencies), to provide confidential data and operational expertise to help refine the platform. Each agency is contributing $56,000 toward the project.

“We thought the best people to challenge our tool are the transit agencies themselves,” says Mohamed. “We have 10 scheduled validation points throughout our project. For every validation point, we’ll send what we have developed, and each transit agency will independently grade it.”

By the end of the project, Mohamed says he is confident the platform will be ready for full commercialization—not just as a planning tool, but with future enhancements that could enable the Orchestrator to make real-time optimization decisions