Demand responsive public transportation using wireless technologies

Abstract

Air pollution has been the bane of society for which we still have not got a satisfying solution. The air pollution due to automobiles constitutes around 60--90% of the total air pollution in the urban area. To curtail this, the mass transportation, bus facilities in particular, in any city has to be fine tuned in such a way that they serve the need of the people. In order to make the whole bus transportation easy and convenient for the public there is a need for optimizing the bus routes based on the destinations of the commuting passengers. In this paper, a demand responsive public transportation scheme is proposed, that also entitles the buses to run without a fixed schedule and adjust the schedules based on the passengers' convenience. On a given map, select places called as the "hot-spots" would serve as the present day bus stop equivalents. These hot-spots will have an appropriate hardware interface for the commuters. Upon suitable activation the passenger is making a request for the bus. This request is sent to a centralized scheduling server which will receive all such requests from various hot-spots, processes them and re-route the nearest bus to the passenger's location. Based on the passenger's destination, a route based on Djiktra's algorithm for least time of transit is generated. The communication between the server and the clients can be achieved though various technologies like GSM, Ethernet or a Wi-Fi enabled network set up. The signal that is sent from the clients to the server will again depend on the chosen network. This will enable the passengers to commute to their destination within a shorter time and in the shortest route possible.