LBS Strand
TransitDroid: Delivering real-rime bus tracking information on mobile
devices
Bashir Shalaik, Ricky Jacob and Adam Winstanley
Introduction
• The recent technological advances in mobile communication, computing and geo-positioning
technologies have made real-time transit vehicle information systems an interesting application area.
• In this work we present a system which displays the transit information on an OpenStreetMap (OSM) web
interface and delivers this information on the Google Android mobile device. The content is in the form of predicted
arrival/departure times for buses at user-selectable geographic locations within a transit region.
• Designing and implementation of a distributed transit vehicle information system will help reduce stress as well
as improve confidence and perception of transit systems.
System Implementation
The system uses off-the-shelf GPS/GPRS integrated units
programmed to transmit location at regular intervals (45 seconds
approximately) while the vehicle is in motion fig(1) shows structure
and components of real time bus tracking system. The data is stored
on a server and is then visualised through a standard web browser to
show views representing current locations of vehicles in close-toreal-time.
Bus
Data
Tracking
Component
Walking time
Prediction
Component
The mobile device provides the user with the
expected arrival time of the next bus at the bus
stop based on the user’s current position.
Web & Mobile Interface Design
In a project between NUIM and Blackpool Transport, a dynamic webbased transit system was developed for controlling and analysing
transport system. The transit information displayed on OSM web
interfaces and Bus Expected time of Arrival is delivered on the
Google Android mobile device.
AVL
Data
This application uses the real-time information
such as current location and timestamp of both
bus and users to provide bus route information.
The web interface provides a graphical interface
which displays and updates vehicle location on
OSM, it also shows vehicle details textually
through table.
Arrival Time
Bus Arrival
Bus Tracking System
Figure (2) Public interface of Blackpool transit system with
updated vehicle location on an OSM interface developed using
OpenLayers.
The system uses web technologies such as
JavaScript, MySQL, XML, PHP and Ajax. The position
of the bus along with the timestamp is sent to the
server using GPRS which inserts the data into a
MySQL database. JavaScript, PHP and Ajax are used
to prepare the web interface in order to display all the
transit information. Fig (2) shows the public interface
of Blackpool transit system with updated vehicle
location on an OSM interface developed using
OpenLayers.
The mobile interface was developed using the open
source android operating system for mobile devices.
In this project a HTC Magic smart phone that runs on
the Android operating system was used to
communicate with the transit project server. The
mobile device uses a HTTP protocol to connect with
the MySQL database on server.figure (2) shows
Emulator device of Android mobile phone with user
current location and Bus expected time of arrival
User Data
Figure(1) Real-time bus tracking system implementation
Place
holder
foran
Image
To view arrival/departure time on the mobile device,
the user selects his/her preferred destination; the
transit system collects his current location from builtin GPS. The user’s current location along with the
destination selected by the user is sent using the
HTTP protocol to the server by appending it to the
URL which connects to the server. The URL from the
mobile device is transmitted and the response is
displayed on the mobile screen.
Fig (3) Emulator device of Android mobile phone with user current location
and Bus expected time of arrival
Conclusion and Future work
In this work we have shown that transit information
collected in real time can be shown on OSM for tracking
and monitoring. Internet enabled mobile phones can
receive real-time transit information.
Android software for smart mobile phones offers the ability
to overcome the physical restriction of interface design on
mobile phones. To further improve bus arrival time
prediction accuracy, transit data from other sources can be
incorporated into the predictor algorithms.
Future work on this project includes development of a
feature which alerts a user when bus is a specified number
of minutes away.