Development of a Feasibility Test App for a Smartphone-Sensor-Based Bus Information System

摘要

As the number of urban vehicles rapidly increases, an intelligent transportation system (ITS) is becoming a must-have, because it can help reduce congestion and emissions, and provides citizens with efficient and convenient services. However, ITS setup and installation requires a huge budget. Therefore, only large metropolitan areas are covered by ITS services. This paper proposes a smartphone-based bus information system (BIS) that does not require any special devices designed for bus detection, and the installation cost is next to nothing. The BIS can be seen as a bus-oriented version of an ITS, and the BIS is adequate for small- and mid-sized cities, because the bus is their only form of public transportation. In the proposed BIS system, somebody (the driver, for example) in a bus sends information about his/her current location to the BIS server using his/her smartphone. Therefore, the usefulness of the proposed BIS depends on the accuracy of the global positioning system (GPS) receiver installed in the smartphone. We performed experiments by collecting GPS data and analyzing the collected data in order to prove that GPS receivers installed in smartphones are accurate enough to determine the location of the bus, and that the proposed smartphone-based BIS is consequently valid. In order to perform these experiments efficiently, we developed a mobile app that allowed us to concurrently collect GPS values from many smartphones.