Time of arrival prediction with dynamic route tracking for public transportation systems

A great challenge in developing countries is the constant traffic jams in urban areas, which are a consequence of excessive use of private vehicles. In these countries, more people would adopt public transportation, e.g., buses, if the time of arrival for the next vehicle to each bus stop could be predicted. In this direction, we propose WiBus, which is a system to estimate buses arrival time, based on information from opportunistic IEEE 802.11 contacts. These estimates are provided to users via a website and a graphical interface for mobile devices. Unlike previous systems, WiBus explicitly takes into account bus route changes, which occasionally happens in developing countries , adjusting the routes with an algorithm for dynamic route creation and maintenance. WiBus is implemented and analyzed via emulation of a real scenario. Experimental results show that WiBus is scalable and meets the needs of large cities with accumulated error of at most a few minutes.