A wireless controlled digital car lock for smart transportation

In current era the Internet of Things (IoT) is becoming an important part of our daily life. It is employed in a variety of applications like smart buildings, intelligent transport systems, smart grid, etc. The aim of this project is to contribute to the evolution of Internet of Things (IoT) application in intelligent transportation systems. The focus is to develop a smartphone based wireless controlled car lock demonstrator for education. Indeed, the recent technological evolution has revolutionized the use of smartphones in our lives. The idea is to allow a group of authorized people to share a lot of cars. Whenever an authorized person requires a car, a request is firstly submitted via internet to a server based utility. On the availability of a car the request is granted and vice versa. In the case of an authorization, a digital code is sent to the smartphone of the person who has originated the car request. In order to convey the digital code, received on the smartphone, to the front end embedded controller a customized Android-based application is devised. It is developed by using the MIT inventor app. This application is installed on the smartphone and it is linked to the front-end embedded controller based digital car lock via the Bluetooth interface. The intended code, to lock or unlock the car, is sent by the concerned person by using this application. The command is transmitted to the front-end embedded controller via the Bluetooth port. After a recognition, the received command is executed by the front-end module and a flag is returned to the smartphone-based soft application. The concerned car status with time and date is also recorded in the application platform and is updated on the cloud. It allows to access this information globally and at any time with a passcode. A system prototype is implemented and tested. Experimental results have confirmed a proper system operation.