Cooperative transit tracking using smart-phones

Real-time transit tracking is gaining popularity as a means for transit agencies to improve the rider experience. However, many transit agencies lack either the funding or initiative to provide such tracking services. In this paper, we describe a crowd-sourced alternative to official transit tracking, which we call cooperative transit tracking. Participating users install an application on their smartphone. With the help of built-in sensors, such as GPS, WiFi, and accelerometer, the application automatically detects when the user is riding in a transit vehicle. On these occasions (and only these), it sends periodic, anonymized, location updates to a central tracking server. Our technical contributions include (a) an accelerometerbased activity classification algorithm for determining whether or not the user is riding in a vehicle, (b) a memory and time-efficient route matching algorithm for determining whether the user is in a bus vs. another vehicle, (c) a method for tracking undergr...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: SENSYS
• Authors: Arvind Thiagarajan, James Biagioni, Tomas Gerlich, Jakob Eriksson
• Keywords: Real-time Transit Tracking, Sensor Networks, SENSYS 2010, Transit, Transit Tracking