Car-level congestion and position estimation for railway trips using mobile phones

We propose a method to estimate car-level train congestion using Bluetooth RSSI observed by passengers' mobile phones. Our approach employs a two-stage algorithm where car-level location of passengers is estimated to infer car-level train congestion. We have learned Bluetooth signals attenuate due to passengers' bodies, distance and doors between cars through the analysis of over 50,000 Bluetooth real samples. Based on this prior knowledge, our algorithm is designed as a Bayesian-based likelihood estimator, and is robust to the change of both passengers and congestion at stations. The car-level positions are useful for passengers' personal navigation inside stations and car-level train congestion information helps determine better strategies of taking trains. Through a field experiment, we have confirmed the algorithm can estimate the location of 16 passengers with 83% accuracy and also estimate train congestion with 0.82 F-measure value in average.