Local Transport Tracker and Reminder System

The bus arrival time is major information to nearly all city transport travelers. Extremely long waiting time at bus stops depresses the travelers and makes them unenthusiastic to take buses. Here, we propose a bus arrival time forecasting and reminder system depending on bus passengers’ participatory sensing. With commodity mobile phones, the bus passengers’ surrounding environmental context is effectively collected and utilized to estimate the bus traveling routes and predict bus arrival time at various bus stops. This system exclusively relies on the mutual effort of the contributed users and is independent of the bus operating companies, so it can be easily adapted to support universal bus service systems without any support from bus operating companies. Instead of referring to GPS-enabled location information, we resort to more generally available and energy efficient sensing resources, including Wi-Fi signals, movement statuses, etc., which bring less burden to the participatory party and encourage their participation. We develop a prototype system with different types of Wi-Fi-based access points (AP) and comprehensively experiment with the buses as well as Pune public buses