Huawei and Qingdao Chengyun Build Global Smart Bus Showcase

Driving the digital and green transformation of urban public transport is essential to shaping modern urbanization. Qingdao Chengyun Holding Group stands at the forefront as a premier state-owned integrated transportation enterprise, managing citywide buses, urban-rural passenger services, renewable energy station operations, and various other businesses. Its fleet of more than 14,000 vehicles serves over 670 million trips annually. However, rapid urban expansion has revealed the shortcomings of traditional bus operations. Capacity scheduling relied heavily on manual experience, making it difficult to precisely forecast dynamic passenger flows. Fragmented management of numerous commercial vehicles hampered operational collaboration, while the widespread adoption of new energy buses has led to chaotic station charging and increased energy management challenges. Ultimately, passenger expectations for convenient and varied travel options are falling through the cracks.

To tackle these common challenges, Qingdao Chengyun partnered with Huawei to establish a unified digital foundation powered by Huawei's next-generation ICTs, including the hybrid cloud, big data, and AI. Utilizing Huawei's Tianquan prediction along with Tianshu scheduling and dispatch engines, they developed nine core algorithms for bus scheduling, daily plan optimization, and real-time dispatching. This led to the creation of the Chengyun e-Control integrated smart management architecture, developing a comprehensive transportation operations system.

Solid cloud foundation: Using Huawei's hybrid cloud architecture, Qingdao Chengyun built a centralized data center that integrates multi-source heterogeneous data while consolidating computing power, data, and applications. This architecture facilitated the deployment of the Chengyun e-Control platform alongside an innovative regional distributed scheduling mode, realizing unified, visualized coordination across more than 1,000 commercial vehicles and over 200 bus routes.

Maximized value of data assets: Backed by transportation datasets under standardized governance, Qingdao Chengyun utilized its data assets as credit enhancement to land CNY30 million in unsecured financing, creating a new industry standard for monetizing data assets across state-owned enterprises.

Widespread digital and intelligent innovation: Qingdao Chengyun was the first in China to develop the passenger flow–driven bus large model that accurately predicts traffic changes, dynamically optimizes the bus network, and intelligently allocates transport capacity and power resources.

• The innovative regional distributed scheduling mode precisely captures tidal patterns in passenger flows, dynamically optimizes departure intervals, and transitions bus operations from fixed timetables to data-driven prediction and demand-responsive transport, effectively resolving the persistent dilemma of peak-hour capacity shortages and off-peak asset underutilization.

• The smart charging scheduling system intelligently works out charging sequences by integrating vehicle operations plans, peak and off-peak electricity prices, and station power distribution loads. This balances station power demand, aligns operational assurance with energy cost management, and supports green, low-carbon public transport.

• The Chengyun e-Life platform has been launched, introducing a suite of innovative services like responsive bus stops, microtransit reservation, customized commuter routes, and tourist buses. By establishing a four-tier network of express, trunk, branch, and micro-circulation routes, the platform deepens the integration between bus and metro networks, continuously enriching travel options for residents.

Digital transformation has delivered measurable business benefits. Following the project's launch, the intelligent annual scheduling algorithm has cut yearly planning time from one day of manual spreadsheet work to just two minutes, improving bus scheduling and dispatch efficiency by 60%. Meanwhile, the charging scheduling algorithm allows dynamic bus charging without interrupting operations, cutting annual charging costs by CNY5,000 per bus and reducing long-term O&M and energy management expenses. Building on this foundation, diverse mobility services like bus-metro connections, customized commuter routes, and tourist buses continue to thrive.

Moving forward, Qingdao Chengyun and Huawei will further advance AI innovation in transportation, employing cutting-edge technology to drive the high-quality development of urban public transport and offering a benchmark for the digital transformation of bus systems in cities worldwide.