Proposal of a Bus Location System Based on Participatory Sensing with BLE Devices and Smartphones

Katsuhiro Naito, Katsuyuki Tanaka

Bus location systems are focused to enhance service quality of public transportation. The traditional issues in the bus location system are difficulties to install expensive special devices and expensive operational expenses for network sys- tems. Recently, some researchers utilize smartphones to mea- sure the environment and to collect information. Additionally, participatory sensing methods, where many common people collaborate to collect data with their own smartphone, have been focused for bus location systems. On the contrary, the developed application for the participatory sensing method has an issue of energy management because the application works continuously in a background process, and consumes much energy. This paper proposes a collaborative mechanism with Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacon devices and smartphones to realize a bus location system. The proposed mechanism em- ploys BLE devices as a beacon device that triggers our special application for smartphones. Therefore, the special application can be automatically launched when a beacon message arrives on the smartphone, and it does not work continuously in a background process. As a result, the proposed system can collect bus location by smartphones in participatory sensing manner without excess energy consumption. In the experiment, we have set up for the bus route of our university transportation service into the smartphone application. Experimental results demonstrated that the developed application can measure its position by a location service and upload the measurement location automatically.

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