There are very few days in a Georgia tech student’s life when he does not travel through college sponsored transport. Stinger, Tech Trolley and
Stingerette are integral part of our life. And many a times we miss them by fraction of a sec. To solve this problem we propose a solution to track the route of Stringer on mobile phones, so that it helps an individual to take decision and gives answers to questions like “Where is the Tech Trolley?”,”
After how much time it is going to arrive?” or “Should I catch it from TSRB or
Midtown?” or “Should I walk so that I am not going to be late for lecture?”.
The answers to these questions are given through this project, by providing the students of Georgia Tech a facility to track the locations of Stingers, Tech
Trolleys and Stingerettes on their mobile phones. The user can use the software to find the best bus-stop for a user to catch the bus to reach his destination as well as to track the positions of any of the buses. The typical feature of this application is to provide a map based interactive feature for the user on his mobile phone.
The idea comes from the ever increasing area of Location based services.
Since the mobile users is increasing tremendously, the location based service is gaining great importance. We intend to provide one such location based

service for the students of Georgia Tech and which would make their fast paced campus life a little easier by the click a button.
Vehicle tracking has been an application of interest for many years in many places. The work was done on these lines in CS 8803 class of spring 2006[1].
The project provided a Bus tracking facility wherein users send a text message as an email using their mobile phones and the application will get back with the time of arrival of the next bus on the route. This was an excellent new idea and was successful over the scope it was defined. That project is a major motivation for our work.
Another system that exists in the Georgia tech campus is Tech Trolley locator, which requires a user to login to the Georgia Tech Parking website [2] and query by inputting the source and destination location. The output of this system is the Tech trolleys estimated time of arrival. We intend to provide this information in the more enhanced form along with the maps of the different routes and the nearest bus stop.
Many other systems like Chicago transit authority [3], The King Kounty
Metro online System [4] and the MyBus project [5] in King County have been developed on similar lines. These projects are on much larger scale as compared to our project. The CTA Bus Tracker is a pilot program which provides estimated arrivals and location information for #20 Madison buses.
User can access this information on the internet via a computer or webenabled PDA, while The Los Angeles Metro System provides the information on a LCD screen and the MyBus project supports queries from mobile phones .
Most of these applications are large scale and there has not been something of the scale of a college campus. Our idea is provide one such solution for the
Georgia Tech campus.
The application is proposed to be used for tracking of all Stingers, Tech
Trolleys and Stingerettes.
The proposed system will work as follows-
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The user will see the campus map of Georgia Tech on his cell phone.
There is one point for each location on the map. Each bus-stop also has a separate point on the map. So he can choose the current location and the destination by pointing to that location in the map/typing the keyword.

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Microsoft map point server gets the co-ordinates of the point. By using reverse geo-coding we get the actual locations of the user and his destination.
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Both the source and destination locations are then fed to the application server. The application server has all the data about the current locations of the buses (mostly collected from Next-bus.com website). Then the bus-stop nearest to the user’s location is calculated using shortest path algorithm. Using this as the input the particular bus reaching closest to the destination is found from a static route data.
Then the time of arrival of the particular bus at that bus-stop is calculated.
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The calculated nearest bus-stop is then returned back to the user as a point on the map. Also the arrival time for the bus is returned back and displayed on the cell phone. If more than one bus reaches the same destination, then multiple results are returned
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The path from the user’s current location to the bus stop is also highlighted on the map.
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Another feature is to just display the current position of all the buses on the map along with a label of their positions. We would like to limit the scope of this feature to demand based request rather than realtime updates of the bus locations.
Software and Hardware Resources –
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J2ME- We going to use J2ME as it is specifically designed for mobile applications. And it is compatible with many mobile emulators especially Nokia Emulator.
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Microsoft Map point – Microsoft Map point web service for fetching the map location from the user.
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Microsoft TerraServer and Nextbus.com – We are going to access
Microsoft TerraServer and nextbus.com for getting GPS information of user location and the bus on route.
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Mobile Application Development Kit (Nokia Emulator / SmartPhone) –
At this point of time we are still undecided as to which emulator should we use. We will look into the functionality and ease of use of each and decide upon the better one.

Timeline –
The project is spanned over 8 weeks and we intend to follow the timeline given below for the project.
Feb 13 th
Feb 20 th
Feb 27 th
March 6 th
March 13 th
March 20 th
March 27 th
April 3 rd
April 10 th
April 17 th
April 24 th
Project Proposal
Study of Microsoft Map Point and J2ME
Displaying maps on the mobile screen
Find location of users using GPS & geo-coding of maps
User Interface
Calculation of bus location and timing data
Integration of modules on emulator
Integration and System Testing
Regression Testing
Project Presentation and Demo
D eliverables –
We plan to demonstrate the interactive bus locator on a mobile phone emulator. The user can specify his current location and destination on the map and get the timings of the next bus at his nearest bus-stop on the emulator. Also the route of the bus as well as the user will be depicted on the graph.
Since the plan is to deploy the system, we want to test the application thoroughly before releasing for deployment. The standard unit testing, integration testing and system testing will be carried out. We also plan to test the performance of the application under multiple requests. The reliability and responsiveness will be studied, especially the response time as it is important for the application to display real-time data as quickly as possible.
Various Tests that we intend to carry out are-
Whether the location of the user is accurately determined
Location of the bus is accurately determined.
Whether the response time of the system is small enough to give efficient results.
Determination of proper route.

If the destination is not reachable with any route then whether the system displays proper message
Approximate calculation of the distance between user location and available nearest bus stops.
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The idea is limited for Stingers and Tech Trolleys right now. It can be extended to the Stingerettes as well. Especially it can replace the Push to Talk service being used right now and avoid inconvenience to users as well as drivers.
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Another extension that can be done is if the destination is not reachable from any route then providing user with other possible places that are nearer to the destination and are reachable through college transport.
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The idea to provide an easy to use service for the students of Georgia
Tech can be extended to the local Marta bus service and train service.
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The idea can be used to find and co-ordinate with group members using the location of friends and colleagues in a similar fashion as we get the location of the bus.
[1] http://disl.cc.gatech.edu/courses/cs8803_spring2006/project/proposals/saraiya.pdf
[2] http://www.parking.gatech.edu
[3] http://ctabustracker.com/bustime/home.jsp
[4] http://transit.metrokc.gov/oltools/tracker.html
[5] http://mybus.org