Towards an Ubiquitous and Context Sensitive Public Transportation System

Transportation systems deal with dynamic and sometimes inconstant scenarios, which could involve events like traffic jams or accidents. Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) should be projected in a way that their behavior changes according to the real world that can be pictured surrounding it. Context is what allows the understanding of this dynamicity and how it impacts the way people decide to use the available transportation. This paper presents UbiBus, a system that aims to integrate the concepts of Computational Context and Ubiquitous Computing into the ITS domain. It considers the mobility of people and vehicles and the occurrence of dynamic factors that could affect the transportation and provide passengers with advanced information about the available public transportation in a city (e.g. the estimated arrival time of a bus, according to its current location and a given bus station, or route and bus recommendations according to the different needs of a passenger at a certain time). To verify the viability of the proposed ideas we developed an application that provides the current location and estimated arrival time of a bus. This application was evaluated after real data collection involving a route created for the city of Salvador, Bahia, which showed the potential of the proposed solution.