Crowdsensing Based Public Transport Information Service in Smart Cities

Thanks to the development of technology and the emergence of intelligent services smart cities promise to their inhabitants enhanced perception of city life. For example, a live timetable service of public transportation can increase the efficiency of travel planning substantially. However, its implementation in a traditional way requires the deployment of some costly sensing and tracking infrastructure. Mobile crowdsensing is an alternative, when the crowd of passengers and their mobile devices are used to gather data for almost free of charge. In this paper, we put the emphasis on the introduction of our crowdsensing based public transport information service, what we have been developing as a prototype smart city application. The front-end interface of this service is called TrafficInfo. It is a simple and easy-to-use Android application which visualizes real-time public transport information of the given city on Google Maps. The lively updates of transport schedule information relies on the automatic stop event detection of public transport vehicles. TrafficInfo is built upon our Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) based communication framework what we designed to facilitate the development of crowd assisted smart city applications. The paper introduces shortly this framework, than describes TrafficInfo in detail together with the developed stop event detector.