The Bengaluru Multimodal Journey Challenge, 2025

Bengaluru has been figuring in the top ten most congested cities in the world in terms of traffic for several years now. One of the ways to address this issue is to provide an easily-accessible, affordable, efficient, and sustainable multi-modal public transport system. This hackathon is aimed at creating broad awareness about multimodal transportation options leading to innovative solutions to the mobility problem in Bengaluru. This hackathon is being co-sponsored by the Bengaluru Metropolitan Transport Corporation (BMTC), Namma Yatri, the Centre of Data for Public Good (CDPG), the Centre for Infrastructure, Sustainable Transportation & Urban Planning (CiSTUP), the Indian Institute of Science (IISc). It will be hosted by IEEE DataPort.The hackathon will start in the last week of August 2025 and the submissions will be evaluated in the first week of October 2025. The participants will be provided with live location data of a large subset of Bengaluru Metropolitan Transport Corporation (BMTC) bus routes for a period of three weeks, the corresponding bus stops along with their locations, as well as information related to Namma Yatri autorickshaw availability and road-segment speed information for the same period. The participants are allowed to use additional sources of publicly-available data (such as weather)  as well. The task consists of three problems:Problem 1: Given the live location of buses of a set of routes up to time \u2018t on a particular day, predict the arrival time of these buses at various bus stops along their routes up to the end of the route.Problem 2: Predict the time required to travel between specified pairs of locations in an autorickshaw for departures falling between time t and time t +1 hour. Problem 3: Predict the total time required to complete a multi-modal journey, which may use a combination of bus and autorickshaw travel. The participants are encouraged to use part of the data for validation purposes. In addition, the organisers may set up a leader board so that the participants can occasionally evaluate the performance of their algorithms on a small ground truth sample.Based on how the submissions score on a separate test dataset, five teams will be selected for the final demos at IISc. The demos will be scored by a team of judges, and the hackathon will conclude with demos by finalists on October 13, 2025, and the announcement of winners on October 14, 2025 in conjunction with the Symposium of Data for Public Good at IISc. The hackathon will be conducted by an organising committee with members from the Centre of Data for Public Good (CDPG), IISc, and the Centre for infrastructure, Sustainable Transportation and Urban Planning (CiSTUP), IISc, with help and advice from the Bengaluru Metro Transportation Corporation, Namma Yatri, and other industry partners. The organising committee may interact with the participants via periodic virtual meetings or an online discussion forum to address any questions or concerns they might have regarding the detailed description of the hackathon and the rules and regulations.