Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA): The MBTA integrated AlphaRoute's NDSP Optimization tool in 2023 to automatically determine each day which paratransit trips should be assigned to dedicated vehicles versus non-dedicated service providers such as Uber and Lyft. In 2024, the system optimized over 1.24 million trips, saving an estimated $22.88 per outsourced trip and reducing scheduling staff's manual work by 4–5 hours daily. | AI Trace
Productivity Automation
The MBTA integrated AlphaRoute's NDSP Optimization tool in 2023 to automatically determine each day which paratransit trips should be assigned to dedicated vehicles versus non-dedicated service providers such as Uber and Lyft. In 2024, the system optimized over 1.24 million trips, saving an estimated $22.88 per outsourced trip and reducing scheduling staff's manual work by 4–5 hours daily.
Details
The AI tool receives daily trip data including service agreements, customer eligibility criteria, and capacity limits, and produces an optimized daily assignment plan routing each eligible trip to the most cost-effective transportation option. Before the tool, MBTA scheduling staff manually reviewed trips and used spreadsheets to determine which to outsource to non-dedicated providers—a process AlphaRoute documented as requiring hours of labor per day. The tool was selected by the MBTA in 2023 and rolled out from pilot to full scale. AlphaRoute is a company with MIT ties and uses MIT-developed routing algorithms.
