GRD Journals | Global Research and Development Journal for Engineering | International Conference on Innovations in Engineering and Technology

(ICIET) - 2016 | July 2016

e-ISSN: 2455-5703

Participatory Sensing for Public Transportation

Information Service
1Ms.

T. R. P. Monisha 2Ms. N. Nandhini 3S. S. Aarthy 4R. Aarthy

1,2,3,4
Department of Information Technology
1,2,3,4
K.L.N College of Engineering Pottapalayam, Sivagangai 630612, India
Abstract
Mobile phones emergence has brought about a huge impact in todays technology. Especially smart phones play a major role in
everyday life. This advantage is used in public transportation service. Public transportation in India has always had its indigenous
issues which have proven to be fatal to many. This issue is addressed here. Here the front end is a Traffic Info application which
is a peer to peer application which helps in knowing the public transportation status. It is a simple and easy-to-use Android
application which visualizes real-time public transport information of the given city on Google Maps. Crowd sensing helps to
make travelling easier and sophisticated. The lively updates are assisted by service provider. We use generic publish/subscribe
communication model in our framework to implement interactions. Traffic Info is built upon Extensible Messaging and Presence
Protocol (XMPP) based communication framework. The significant features of Traffic Info are Visualization, Information
Sharing and Sensing.
Keyword- android application, crowdsourcing, Traffic Info, Traffic updates
__________________________________________________________________________________________________

I. INTRODUCTION
Metropolitan cities or smart cities often engage in various services which might have many difficulties relating to maintenance.
Services offered by big cities are huge and often difficult to maintain. There are many services such as water, electricity, roads,
transportation etc. One of the leading services is transportation. The grievances faced by the public regarding transportation are
innumerable. This is one of the major issues. The government cannot also be blamed as it is difficult to manage such a huge
network. Thinking of using high level technology can cost more and require a large amount of skilled labour. The only
alternative to make public transportation more reliable and easy is to use affordable technology.
When it comes to affordable and ideal technology for use, then it would be mobile phones. Nowadays mobile phone has
made a huge impact on every single person. People started moving using mobile phones not only to communicate but also for
various reasons such as data sharing, transactions, and much more. India ranks second in the usage of mobile phones. 79 citizens
use mobile phones out of 100 according to the survey held on 31st October 2015[1]. The success in mobile phones gradually let
to the development of smart phones. India is the 3rd largest smart phone market in the world, India to reach 314 million mobile
internet users by 2017[2]. Android phones have marked its fullest success. This major technology can be used to address a major
issue.
Android phones have made a great impact in mobile phone evolution. Everyone in a smart city or metropolitan city
would own an android phone. This is the key tool here to unlock the major transportation problem. Here, in this solution, real
time data is tracked and collected to provide more accurate and instant updates using mobile crowd sensing[3]. This does not
require any external investment. In this scenario the passengers live updates and their inbuilt sensors located in their mobile
phones can serve the purpose. The Global Positioning System (GPS) is a space-based navigation system that provides location
and time information in all weather conditions, anywhere on or near the Earth where there is an unobstructed line of sight to four
or more GPS satellites. This GPS location tracking can aid in knowing the current location of the bus with the time of last
update. Apart from this sensor, every user using the public transportation can help in feeding the data for refinement and more
exact details. Thus the customer waiting to get on board can view the details provided by the sensors and passengers travelling
on that particular vehicle. Here the customer becomes the sole benefactor of the service.
In this paper we have used the front end as the Traffic Info application which helps the user in communicating with the
end users. The producer who are going to provide the live updates, provide the information using an unique identification
number. The consumer on the other hand can provide the unique identification number of the vehicles status to be known. Once
the ID is entered, the location of the vehicle is displayed using Google maps along with the current status of the vehicle.
JSON [4] has played a major part in the retrieval of data from the MySQL database. JSON API has been used in PHP as
well as in the java files.

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II. PROJECT OBJECTIVE

To make travelling easier and accessible.

To know the status of the vehicle waiting to be bored.

III. PROBLEM STATEMENT

Travelling on a public transportation has always been a hectic task. The vehicles don't arrive as per schedule due to various
issues such as traffic or other failures. We may also not be sure whether the vehicles have passed through our boarding points.
These issues are faced daily by school goers, working people and senior citizens. Even if they arrive on time, seats are deficit and
the vehicle's condition is worst. These problems are addressed in this paper.

IV. RELATED WORK

Here we discuss the previous work done and prove the work discussed here is better than the previous work. The crowdsourcing
technique used here requires both the participation of producers and consumers. The user namely the producers and consumers
are referred as prosumers. The application can prove its best only upon maximum involvement of prosumers. Therefore its very
much necessary to attract people to use the application. Which makes it is essential for the service provider to attract users.
However, we face a serious problem here. The consumers do not pay much heed if there is no much contribution from the
producer side. The producers use the application if they have personal benefits out of it. To make the producers more
participative incentives can be provided to encourage the usage.
Moovit is one application similar to Traffic Info which provides live traffic information to the users. The difficulty
faced here is that the application works fine on location where there is a huge population like Paris. It also doesnt prove its
worth in scarcely populated cities like Budapest.
There are other such works published in recent days. For instance, the authors in [6] propose a bus arrival time
prediction system based on bus passengers' participatory sensing. The proposed system uses movement statuses, audio
recordings and mobile cell tower signals to provide the exact location of the vehicle. And the reference in [7] uses smartphone
sensors data and machine learning techniques to detect the type of motion. Like whether the provider is travelling by train or by
car or any other mode of transportation.

V. FRAMEWORK FOR CROWD SENSING BASED SMART CITY APPLICATIONS

Fig. 1: Dataflow diagram of Traffic Info application

The Index activity is the first activity which is launched when the application is triggered. Once the vehicles unique
identification number is mentioned. The user can choose to be a producer or consumer on clicking the Provide Info or View
Status buttons respectively. Once the button is clicked the vehicles unique number is carrier over to the next activity.
In Provide Info activity, the producer can provide the observed information to aid the information sharing feature. In
View Status activity, the consumer can view the details which are filtered and provided by the service provider. The consumer
also enjoys the privilege of viewing the location of the bus in the Google maps. The vehicles marker displays the last update
time of the vehicle information along with the vehicles number.
The GPS sensor acts in the background of the Provide Info activity which is hidden from the producer. The producers
mobile device acts as the GPS sensing device. This provided information is all fed to the repository for collecting, cleansing,
analyzing process.

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Participatory Sensing for Public Transportation Information Service

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VI. PROPOSED SYSTEM

This paper deals with the Traffic Info android application which provides lively updates on public transportation system. This
application uses GPS for tracking the movement of the vehicle which is tracked down from the mobile phones of the producers.
The accelerometer is also used in this application for traffic detection. This built-in sensor facilitate in detecting the traffic
intensity. On the other hand the users of this application can feed additional information on vehicles condition.

Fig. 2: Real-time public transport information service based on mobile crowd sensing.

VII. COMMUNICATION MODEL

Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) is a communications protocol for message-oriented middleware based on
XML (Extensible Markup Language). The Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) is a protocol for streaming
XML [XML] elements in order to exchange messages and presence information in close to real time. This protocol is used in our
framework of publish/subscribe. This framework has three main roles namely Producer, Consumer and service provider. These
roles are discussed briefly.
A. Producer
The Producer is the original sponsor in our model who help in producing raw data and plays a central role in data collection.
She/he is the one who also provides us with the location information of the vehicle through the inbuilt sensor.
B. Consumer
The Consumer is the sole subscriber of the provided service(s). She/he enjoys the value of the collected, cleaned, analysed,
extended and disseminated information. We call the user as Prosumer, when he acts in the service as both Consumer and
Producer at the same time.
C. Service Provider
The Service Provider collects the raw data provided by the producer and the sensor provided location data. These data are
processed, analysed and categorised. The refined data are provided by the service provided to the consumer on request.

VIII. TRAFFIC INFO FEATURES

The three main features provided by Traffic Info are visualisation, information sharing and sensing.
A. Visualisation
An example of this feature is depicted in the Figure 3. The consumer waiting in their stops can view such information about the
vehicle they want to board. The user interface facilitates easy understating of the information displayed by the service provider.
Provision of the unique vehicle ID is enough to view all the information about the vehicle to be bored. JSON plays a key role in
visualisation of data required indirectly.
B. Information Sharing
The second feature is about information sharing. Passengers can share their observations regarding the vehicles they are currently
riding. Figure 4 shows the Provide Info screen that is used to provide the information about the vehicle. The feedback

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information is provided by mentioning the unique ID of the vehicle. It is up to the user what information and when he wants to
submit. The layout of the UI is designed using the Extensible Markup Language (XML)[5]. This facilitate in designing the
required format with ease.
C. Sensing
The third feature is collecting smartphone sensor readings without user interaction, which is almost invisible for the user. This is
one of the background process not known to the provider itself. Though the sensing is done on the providers side using his/her
own device. When the provider provides the information the GPS, inbuilt sensor senses the exact location of the mobile phone
which is the location of the vehicle. The collected latitude and longitude readings are stored in the repository.

Fig. 3: View Status activity

Fig. 4: Provide Info activity

IX. FURTHER ENHANCEMENT

As future work, we plan to enhance the services provided by the application in response to the feedbacks got from the users.
Moreover, to get the feedbacks of real users, we have planned to conduct real time experiment covering a few localities. Their

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feedback is important to plan the directions for improvements. This work is also thought to be enhanced by providing LDC
displays which shows live updates on the stops of the vehicle.

REFERENCES
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_mobile_phones_in_use
[2] http://yourstory.com/2015/07/mobile-internet-report-2015/
[3] R. Ganti, F. Ye, and H. Lei, Mobile Crowdsensing: CurrentState and Future Challenges, IEEE Commun. Mag., Nov.
2011, pp. 3239.
[4] http://www.json.org/
[5] T. Bray et al., Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0 (Fifth Edition), W3C, W3C Recommendation REC-xml-20081126,
Nov. 2008, http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/RECxml-20081126/.
[6] P. Zhou et al., How Long to Wait?: Predicting Bus Arrival Time with Mobile Phone based Participatory Sensing, Proc.
10th Intl. Conf. Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services (MobiSys 2012), June 2012.
[7] L. Bedogni, M. Di Felice, and L. Bononi, By Train or by Car? Detecting the User's Motion Type Through Smartphone
Sensors Data, Proc. IFIP Wireless Days Conf. (WD 2012), 2012, pp. 16.

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