Extracting Bus Lines Services Information from GPS Registries

The efficiency of urban mobility is a huge concern of urban population around the world. Because of this reason, city planners spend much of their time monitoring transportations systems and designing solutions in order to improve the system's quality. Among these solutions, the most successful ones are computational tools called Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). The success of ITS has encouraged public agencies, owners of the public transportation system information, to share their datasets with the population aiming to stimulate the development of new research and solutions that could help to improve urban mobility. Taking advantage of this trend, this work uses the Rio de Janeiro buses GPS logs dataset to extract some of the main operational information about the city bus system. More specifically, garage locations, start and end points of a route, and the route (the complete sequence of streets) of a bus line are inferred.This information is extremely important for both city planners and population since administrators can benefit from it to better plan the transportation system and the population can become more informed about the system, what improves its reliability and overall usage satisfaction.