A crowd-assisted real-time public transport information service: No more endless wait

Many passengers have expressed frustration in waiting for public bus endlessly without knowing the estimated arrival time. In many developing countries, requiring bus operators to invest in the installation of a GPS unit on every bus in order to track the bus location and subsequently predicting the bus arrival time can be costly. This paper proposes passenger-assisted sharing of bus location to provide an estimation of bus arrival time. Our scheme aims to exploit the availability and capability of passenger mobile phones to share location information of the travelling buses in order to collect transportation data, at the same time provide an estimation of bus arrival time to the general public. A mobile app is developed to periodically report bus location to the cloud service, and it can detect location spoofing by malicious users. The preliminary results of the field tests suggest that the proposed system is viable and the predicated ETA falls within three minutes of the bus actual arrival time.