IoT-Based Shared Community Transportation System Using e-Bikes

Smart Cities have many smart applications such as smart transportation. Nowadays some of the transportation models are changing from individual ownership to shared and distributed ownership. Examples of such models are Uber, uDrive, and Lyft which utilize the distributed vehicles model that have been implemented all over the world. These models are used to serve commuters for inter- and intra-city travel. However, short-range urban transportation services within compounds, campuses, residential compounds, and public parks such as bicycles are not being explored to their full capacity compared to the distributed vehicle model. This research proposes the design of a Smart Mobility Shared Transportation System to serve short-range travel. The system consists of an edge computing device which is installed on an electric bike (e-bike), charging station, web application, mobile application, and a server. Each bike is considered as an object (Thing) that is connected to the Internet, which makes it an Internet of Thing (IoT). The bike's whereabouts, status and surrounding environmental parameters uploaded to the web server for data analytics and visualization through a tailored web application for the administrators. A mobile app is developed to enable users to start using the bike sharing system. The proposed system can be scaled to build a distributed shared mobility system that can fit hundreds of bikes.