Peer Reviewed Journal via three different mandatory reviewing processes, since 2006, and, from September 2020, a fourth mandatory peer-editing has been added.
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.
