A survey on real time bus monitoring system

International Research Journal of Engineering and Technology (IRJET) e-ISSN: 2395 -0056
Volume: 04 Issue: 01 | Jan -2017 www.irjet.net p-ISSN: 2395-0072
© 2017, IRJET | Impact Factor value: 5.181 | ISO 9001:2008 Certified Journal | Page 1605
A Survey on Real Time Bus Monitoring System
S.R.Janani1, J. Karthipriya2, S.P.Keerthana3,M.Muhammed Rasik Fareed4
1Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, SNS College of Technology (Autonomous)
Sathy main Road, Vazhiyampalayam pirivu, Coimbatore-35, Tamil Nadu, India.
1jananiselvaraj.mit@gmail.com
2,3,4final year,Department of Computer Science and Engineering, SNS College of Technology(Autonomous)
Sathy main Road, Vazhiyampalayam pirivu, Coimbatore-35, Tamil Nadu, India,
---------------------------------------------------------------***---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Abstract - Nowadays the students and staffs are using
the various transport facilities to reach the institution
such as government bus, private bus, institution bus, own
vehicle.75% of the people prefers the transport service
provided by the institution due to the safety and security
reasons. Without knowing the exact location of the buses
most of the students, staffs are waiting for long time in bus
stop and also have a chance to miss the buses. There are
various bus monitoring techniques that play a vital role in
solving these problems. This study is an attempt to
showcase various techniques for bus monitoring, accident
detection and alerting system, fuel monitoring system and
an overview about the proposed methodology.
Keywords : GPS, sensors, IoT, Raspberry pi.
1.INTRODUCTION
A variety of transportation facilities are available for the
staff and students to reach their institution. Most of them
uses their own transport vehicle or buses provided by
the institution to reach destination on time. Probably
80% of people prefer to use institution bus services,
because they consider safety and security as important
factor.75% of them asserted they had been late to the
destination because of waiting at bus stop for long hours
and difficulty in knowing the exact location of the buses.
This is one of the challenge problem faced by most of the
people and calls for technology to solve the problem.
With the help of tracking system the students and staffs
can track the exact location of the buses, can view the
arrival time of the bus to the requested location from
their mobile device. Now-a-days lot of accidents happens
due to increase in traffic and also due to rash driving of
the drivers. In many situations the ambulance and police
authority are not informed on time. It results in delaying
the help reached to the person suffered due to accident.
The accident alert system detects the location of the bus
and sends alert messages to the hospital which provides
timely treatment to the affected people. Another
problem faced by bus administration and the driver is
maintaining the fuel details. The actual record of fuel
refilling and fuel consumption in vehicles is not
maintained. The quantity of fuel refilling are noted
manually by the driver or by the administration. The fuel
monitoring system solves this problem and reduces the
manual effort and error probability.
2.FOUNDATION
As a foundation, the basics of real time bus monitoring
system are explained in this section.
1.1 Internet of Things
Internet of Things refers to scenarios where network
connectivity and computing capability extends to
objects, sensors and everyday items not normally
considered computers but Internet of Things allows
these devices to generate, exchange and consume data
with minimal human intervention. IoT systems like
networked vehicles, intelligent traffic systems, sensors
embedded in roads and bridges makes a idea closer to
“smart cities’’, which helps to minimize the congestion
and the energy consumption. IoT implementations use
different technical communications models, in which
each has its own characteristics. The Four common
communications models are
 Device-to-Device
 Device-to-Cloud
 Device-to-Gateway
 Back-End Data-Sharing
1.2 Global Positioning System
The GPS consists of 24 satellites, that circle the globe
once every 12 hours, to provide worldwide position,
time and velocity information. GPS helps to identify
locations on the earth by measuring distance from the
satellites. The GPS system comprises of three segments.
They are
 Space segment
 Control segment
 User segment

When a GPS receiver is turned on, it downloads orbit
information of all the satellites. Once the information is
downloaded, it is stored in the receiver’s memory for
future use. Even though the GPS receiver knows the
location of the satellites in space, it needs to know the
distance from each satellite where it is receiving a signal
from. The distance is calculated, by the receiver. It is
calculated by multiplying the velocity of the transmitted
signal and the time it takes the signal to reach the
receiver. The GPS receiver’s clock is less accurate than
the atomic clock in the satellite. The distance
measurement must be corrected to account for the
receiver’s internal clock error of GPS
3.SURVEY
There are various methods for bus tracking, accident
detection and alerting, fuel monitoring. This section
describes each method.
3.1 WiLocator
WiLocator is to track and predict the arrival time of an
urban buses based on the surrounding WiFi information.
WiFi Access Points (APs) are distributed densely along
the road segments of the urban bus routes. It provides
services to many transit agencies, third-party companies
that are commonly equipped each bus with a GPS-
enabled in-vehicle device. The WiLocator is made of
three components: WiFi-enabled commodity off-the-
shelf smartphones, carried by the bus driver for crowd
sensing. The smartphone periodically scans the
surrounding WiFi information, and reports it to the
server, a back-end server shifts the computation burden
to the server, which includes real-time bus tracking,
arrival time prediction, traffic map generation and a user
interface such that the real-time bus track, schedule of
the buses, traffic map, can be readily available for
intended bus riders.
1) Drawbacks: The unstable Wifi signals and
complicated outdoor environment along the road
segments are the challenges for tracking the buses. The
WiLocator is installed in smart phone of the bus driver
and it should be carried by the driver
3.2 EasyTracker
EasyTracker is an automatic transit mapping. The transit
agency must obtain smartphone, install an app and place
a phone in each transit vehicle. It can either be
permanently fit in the vehicle, or may be carried by the
bus driver. A central location server collects location
updates from all in-vehicle devices. The acknowledged
records are set through batch processing and online
processing. In the batch processing, a huge set of
recorded GPS traces are processed to produce route
shapes, bus stop location and bus schedules. Online
processing matches vehicles to routes and performs the
arrival time prediction. In order to make arrival time
predictions, these navigation-enabled systems requires
additional information. This system produces high-
fidelity route maps, extracts transit stop locations, and
constructs transit schedules that consistently out-
perform the official schedules produced by the transit
authority.
1) Drawbacks: The tracking method is a complex
process and it can accessed only by the transit authority.
3.3 GPS-GSM Based Tracking
GPS-GSM based tracking system is to track the location
of bus with the help of google map. After installation the
system will locate target with the help of a Web
application which is a HTML based application in Google
map. The web application named as ‘Tracking System’. It
represents the complete output of this system. In this
system two applications are developed and they are
linked to each other. The First application is used to get
the initial position of the vehicle that is the starting point
and as system will receive the different co-ordinates
which is the longitude and latitude position switching to
the next one will be done to get the distance travelled
between the two positions. This application will run on
WAMP server. The system allows to track the target
anytime and anywhere in any weather conditions.
1) Advantages: This system is user friendly and it
can be easily installed, easily accessed and can be used
for various other purposes.
2) Drawbacks: The user has to open two
application to enter the starting point and the co-
ordinates.
3.4 Adaptive vehicle tracking
An adaptive vehicle tracking methodology is developed
for public transportation. This methodology is a two
pronged approach. The first one is User Request
Processing and the other is Vehicle Information
Processing. In the User Request Processing, the user first
sends an SMS through their mobile to real time informer
number with the information about the area codes of
their source location and the final destination. The
message sent user is received through a mobile at the
server station. The system then processes the request
and sends the approximate location of the bus and when
it may arrive. The steps involved in vehicle information
processing at first every bus is allotted a route and a
unique mobile number is given to the bus the SIM card
will do it. The route of the bus and its number is
registered. Then certain codes for the buses are allotted

to every station which is made known to the driver.
Whenever the bus reaches route station, the driver just
needs to hold down the corresponding code key on the
device in the bus. It automatically generates a message
containing the current location and reports back to the
server where the server is updated. When the user sends
a request, data from the server is sent to the user
through a text message about the location and estimated
time of arrival.
1) Advantages: This is a real time system hence the
results will be accurate to an acceptable level.
2) Drawbacks: The bus driver has to note down
each time the bus reaches the new location and to hold
on the key in the device.
3.5 Open MTC platform
It is a mobile tracking system using open MTC platform.
It monitors the vehicles position and in special cases the
speed, cabin temperature and number of passenger can
also be monitored. The monitoring process is done using
position of vehicle from satellite through GPS device and
sends the received data to server through GSM modem.
The vehicle data is managed using Machine-to-Machine
(M2M) communication form. The Open Machine Type
Communication platform for aggregating and processing
location data. Monitoring application is supported by
seven main modules they are GSM and GPS modules,
SMS timer, a control system consisting of two sub
modules namely data processing module and SMS
sending interface. On the server side there is M2M
platform to handle process of receiving information and
giving services to application and on the side of user. The
system has a web application to show vehicle's position
that moves on Google maps which presents a real time
movement of the tracked objects. A vehicle's position is
detected by taking information from satellite data
received by GPS module. The data received by
monitoring system is processed by concerning timer and
further it is sent to OpenMTC using SMS media. This
sending process is periodically done and determined by
user. The information received by OpenMTC gateway
will be forwarded to the user application. The user
should be previously subscribed to it using the OpenMTC
APIs. The data is processed and adapted with the help of
Google map format then displayed in form of Google
map.
3.6 Accident Alert
Accident alert system gives the live updates of accidental
vehicle with their location details with help of GPS. It
ensures the vehicle which has got accident to send
location details to web server located at emergency
ambulance centre. The system uses the Raspberry Pi,
Vibration Sensors, GPS and GSM modules to detect
accidents. The GPS continuously takes input data from
the satellite and stores the latitude, longitude values in
ATmega16 microcontroller's buffer. To track the vehicle,
message has to be forwarded to GSM device, by which it
gets activated. It also gets activated by detecting accident
with the help of shock sensor connected to Raspberry Pi.
It deactivates GPS with the help of relay .Once GSM gets
activated it takes the last received latitude and longitude
positions values from the buffer. The GSM sends a
message to a central emergency dispatch server which is
predefined in the program.
1) Drawbacks: Central dispatch server is needed
for processing the location details.
3.7 Fuel monitoring
It monitors the level of the fuel in the vehicle. It uses reed
switch which works according to the principle of Hall
Effect for sensing the amount of fuel filled in the vehicle
and amount of fuel consumed. Then this record is stored
in the system memory. The system is composed of
central control system, communication system, sensor
system, power system and a microcontroller based fuel
monitoring. The interfacing unit consists of two fuel level
sensors. Fuel Sensors 1 and 2.Fuel sensor 1 is placed at
the inlet of fuel tank, as the disk of flow meter rotates,
due to the magnet present on the disk it will make and
break the reed switch. Pulses will be available as an
input to the microcontroller. By counting these pulses
and multiplying it by a flow factor will get exact amount
of fuel filled. Fuel sensor 2 is placed at the outlet of fuel
tank, as the disk of flow meter rotates, due to the magnet
present on the disk it will make and break the reed
switch. The square pulses are the input to the
microcontroller. By counting these pulses and
multiplying it by a flow factor we will get exact amount
of fuel consumed.
4.CONCLUSION
Thus in this paper we have discussed the various
methods used for bus tracking, accident detection and
fuel monitoring and their advantages and drawbacks are
explained.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
We would like to express our sincere thanks to the
institution for providing us the platform. Other than that
we are grateful to all the previous researchers for their
publications which helped us a lot.

REFERENCES
[1] Wenping Liu, Jiangchuan Liu, Hongbo Jiang,
Bicheng Xu, Hongzhi Lin, Guoyin Jiang,Jing Xing,
Huazhong University of Science and Technology,
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Bus Tracking and Arrival Time Prediction in
Urban Environments”, 2016 IEEE 36th
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Merrifield, Jakob Eriksson, “EasyTracker:
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Time Prediction Using Smartphones”, November
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[3] Pankaj Verma, J.S Bhatia, “Design and
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A survey on real time bus monitoring system

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