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EasyTracker: automatic transit tracking, mapping, and arrival time prediction using smartphones

Published: 01 November 2011 Publication History

Abstract

In order to facilitate the introduction of transit tracking and arrival time prediction in smaller transit agencies, we investigate an automatic, smartphone-based system which we call EasyTracker. To use EasyTracker, a transit agency must obtain smartphones, install an app, and place a phone in each transit vehicle. Our goal is to require no other input.
This level of automation is possible through a set of algorithms that use GPS traces collected from instrumented transit vehicles to determine routes served, locate stops, and infer schedules. In addition, online algorithms automatically determine the route served by a given vehicle at a given time and predict its arrival time at upcoming stops.
We evaluate our algorithms on real datasets from two existing transit services. We demonstrate our ability to accurately reconstruct routes and schedules, and compare our system's arrival time prediction performance with the current "state of the art" for smaller transit operators: the official schedule. Finally, we discuss our current prototype implementation and the steps required to take it from a research prototype to a real system.

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cover image ACM Conferences
SenSys '11: Proceedings of the 9th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems
November 2011
452 pages
ISBN:9781450307185
DOI:10.1145/2070942
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 01 November 2011

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Author Tags

  1. GPS trace processing
  2. bus
  3. public transit
  4. real-time tracking
  5. smartphone
  6. transportation

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