Smart Timetable Service Based on Crowdsensed Data

Rapid technological development and the introduction of smart services make it possible for modern cities to offer an enhanced perception of city life for their inhabitants. For instance, a smart timetable service of the city’s public transportation lines updated in real-time can decrease unnecessary waiting times at stops and increase the efficiency of travel planning. However, the implementation of such a service in a traditional way requires the deployment and maintenance of some costly sensing and tracking infrastructure. Fortunately, for this purpose mobile crowdsensing can be a viable and almost free of charge alternative. In this case, the crowd of passengers and their mobile devices are used to gather data.

In this chapter, we place emphasis on the introduction of a crowdsensing based smart timetable service, which has been developed as a prototype smart city application. The front-end interface of this service is called TrafficInfo. It is a simple and easy-to-use Android application which visualizes public transport information of the given city on Google Maps in real-time. The live updates of transport schedule information rely on the automatic stop event detection of public transport vehicles. TrafficInfo is built upon an Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) based communication framework which was designed to facilitate the development of crowd assisted smart city applications.