Incremental location searching for route anomaly detection

Since the introduction of iPhone in 2007, smartphones have become very popular. The high mobility of smartphones has created many applications that are not possible or inconvenient for PCs and servers, even notebooks. One of the mobile applications, location-based services (LBS), has attracted great attention recently. This paper proposes location-based research, which uses location information to find route anomalies, a common problem of daily life. For example, an alert should be generated when a school bus misses part of a route. Different kinds of route anomalies are discussed and various methods for detecting the anomalies are proposed in this paper. The major methods use a technique of incremental location search, which finds matched routes as the search route is entered location by location. An alert is generated when no matched routes exist. Preliminary experiment results show the proposed methods are effective and easy-to-use.