International Journal of Science and Research (IJSR)

ISSN (Online): 2319-7064

Index Copernicus Value (2013): 6.14 | Impact Factor (2014): 5.611

Predicting Bus Arrival Time with GPS on Android

Application
Deeksha Bhardwaj1, Sandip Daphal2, Anand Nerkar3
1, 2, 3
Savitribai Phule Pune university, G.H Raisoni Institute of Engineering and Technology, Wagholi, Pune, India

Abstract: In order to facilitate the introduction of transmit tracking and arrival time prediction in smaller tranasit agencies, we search
an Andriod-based system which we call Tracker. To use tracker, a transit agency should obtain smartphones, install an application, and
place a phone or GPS in each transit vehicle. Our goal is to require no other input. This level of automation is possible due to a set of
algorithms that use GPS traces collected from instrumented transit vehicles to decide routes served, find stops, and deduce schedules.
The primary information to most city transport buses is arrival time. It often dishearten the passengers for excessively waiting long time
at bus stops and makes them averse to take the public transport, travellers. To enable the passenger to track the vehicle or bus an
electronic device is established in a vehicle is known as Vehicle tracking System. This paper suggest a bus arrival time prediction using
GPS,GSM technology. It would work as theft protection system and inexpensive source of vehicle tracking. It is an system using GPS
(Global Positioning System), GSM (Global System for Mobile Communication) and Microcontroller for tracking the travellers. The real
time co-ordinates obtained from the GPS device will continually monitor a moving vehicle and report the position of the vehicle on
request to passengers. The GPS/GSM unit is fix on the bus sends the data to the central monitoring system using the GSM module and
show bus location name on the LCD. The status i.e Latitude and Longitude of a vehicle from distant place is sent by the GSM module to
the Server and then the server calculates the ingress time of the bus and sends to the requested user through GSM module. A real-time
vehicle tracking system uses a global positioning system (GPS) technology module to receive the location of the vehicle, to forward into
microcontroller and to connect network by a general packet radio service (GPRS) technology for displaying a real time on the website or
android map developed by Google Map which allows inspection of vehicles at all times. There are the GPS and GPRS modules, the GPS
module will excavate the vehicles via the satellite, and will bring together all data and redirect it to the webapplication on student’s
device by a contoller. Here the system is handle by a bus in charge. It can notify students for several bus routes, timetables, bus location,
etc. It also send notification to the students when data is updated. System also prevent to enter an unauthorized students in bus.

Keywords: GPS, GSM, SBAS, WAAS

1. Introduction perhaps additional mechanical part designed to perform a

specific function is known as an Embedded System. An
THE transportation system provide as the heart in the embedded system is software driven, real-time control
economic and social growth of the country. Due to the fast system, microcontroller-based, reliable, human or network
rate of population in India there is a fast explode in vehicle interactive, autonomous, operating on diverse physical
which results in a burden on metropolitan traffic variables and in diverse environments and sold into a
management. As the public transport has become an competitive and cost conscious market.
important part of the urban transportation advance in easily
available technology can be enforced which not only help the In this paper, our aim is to minimize the cost and complexity
person who recalculate between a suburban and city to get of content these services by creating Easy Tracker, an
the travelling information and also help a person in order to automatic system for transit tracking, processing, and advent
belt down there swift with the final real time location [6].In time prediction.[5]
many parts of the cosmos, public transport especially the bus
sluice has been well developed. In order to reduce the fuel Under the rubric of Advanced Public Transportation Systems
consumption, clubby car usage and comfort traffic (APTS), a number of projects have been implemented to
congestion we can use the bus transport services. The improve distribution of pertinent information (departure
passengers want to know the precise advent time of the bus, time, vehicle delay, vehicle position) about a mass transit
when travelling with the buses. The passengers become system directly to therider. This paper presents an algorithm
anxious while extremely waiting for a perennial time at the developed in an APTS project whose primary objective was
bus stop and make them indecisive to take buses. Most twofold: 1) development of real-time departure information
passengers are usually ripe to office and many of the students displays for transit vehicles and 2) use of such displays to
are retarted to the class as they determine to wait for the bus provide riders waiting at transit centers with useful
instead of taking an alternate transportation. information. This paper discusses the development of an
algorithm to accurately predict arrival times of vehicles
The travellers can madean literal choice of whether or not to given both real-time data on a vehicles position and
wait at a bus stop if they had an easy approach to see which information about its path.[5]
bus is nearby to their location and an precise time it would
take to attain the bus stop. A contrive of an embedded system 2. Literature Survey
which is used for tracking and positioning of any vehicle by
using Global Positioning System (GPS) and Global system The bus companies generally provide bus timetables on the
for mobile communication (GSM) is suggest in this paper. A web. Such bus timetables only provide limited information
combination of computer hardware and software, and (e.g., operating hours, time intervals,) which are not timely

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Paper ID: NOV152627 122
Licensed Under Creative Commons Attribution CC BY
 International Journal of Science and Research (IJSR)
ISSN (Online): 2319-7064
Index Copernicus Value (2013): 6.14 | Impact Factor (2014): 5.611
updated according to instant traffic conditions. Although services and social networking services. Mobile devices
many commercial information providers offer the real time consumes large amount of energy by continuously capturing
bus arrival prediction information, the service usually comes this contex information. A new design framework for Gps
with prestigious cost. With a fleet of thousands of buses, the Based bus arrival time predicting system is proposed in
installment of in- vehicle GPS systems requires tens millions previous paper.
of dollars. The network infrastructure to deliver the these
service raises the deployment cost even higher, which would We present a new bus arrival time prediction system based
eventually translate to increase expenditure of on Gps based sensing. We interviewed bus passengers on
passengers.Participatory Sensing, user activity recognition acquiring the bus arrival time. Many passengers indicate that
and passenger Sensing provides a rich contextual they want to instantly track the arrival time of the
information for applications of mobile such as location based

Figure 1: System Architecture

Buses and they are willing to contribute their location 3) Online processing - which uses the real-time location of a
information on buses to help to establish a system to estimate vehicle to predict arrival time.
the arrival time at various bus stops for the community. This 4) User interface - allows a user to access current vehicle
motivates us to design a Gps based service to bridge those locations and predicted arrival times.
who want to know bus arrival time (querying users) by
tracking the bus and able to share the instant bus route 4. Modules
information .[1]
1. Module on Server Side
This type of vehicle tracking, which simply rking theports In server side module, used to stored data which is updated
the locations of all active vehicles, is widely available today. by the GPS installed inside bus. If any user can request to
While this is a useful service, its utility for transit applica- particular bus location or arrival time of the bus, then server
tions is somewhat diminished by a lack of sufficient can sent information to that particular user which are stored
navigation metadata: what route is each bus driving, and at in his database. Figure 1. showing the system architecture
what time will it arrive at my stop? State of the art systems
provide this metadata by means of an in vehicle device 2. Module Inside the Bus
which accepts driver input, such as the current route, as well In inside bus module, GPS devices has installed in bus that
as by estimating arrival times based on current vehicle device have minimum 12v battery backup. GPS device
location, past travel times, and the official route schedule.[4] continuousally collect the information and that information
sent to server.
Manually collecting this information can be a time-
consuming and complex task for many transit agencies. The 3. Module for Users (Android)
authors have personal experience from working with four In user side module, each client have android application
different transit agencies, which serve between 1,000 and through that application client can send request to server for
500,000 trips per day. Anecdotally, one such agency, despite getting information about bus location and arrival time of
an annual budget of $250M, lacks the resources to produce bus where the user waiting at our bus stop.
route shape files for their existing bus routes. As a conse-
quence, their routes do not appear in Google Maps [8] and 5. Related Technology
other trip planning services.
1. GPS Technology
3. System Architecture and Overview A highly integrated smart GPS module with a ceramic GPS
patch antenna is G7020 GPS as shown in below fig 1. with
This system consists of four main components 14 channel track engine and 51 channel acquisition engine
1) Smartphone - installed in each bus or vehicle, which the module is capable of of receiving signals from up to 65
functions as a tracking device or an automatic vehicle GPS satellites and transferring them into the precise position
location system. and timing information that can be read over either UART
2) Back-end server- which stores vehicle trajectories into port or RS232 serial port. Operable at 3.6V-6V, Cold start ≈
schedules, route maps and prediction parameters, 29 seconds under clear Sky, Hot start ≈ 1 second under clear

Volume 5 Issue 1, January 2016

www.ijsr.net
Paper ID: NOV152627 123
Licensed Under Creative Commons Attribution CC BY
 International Journal of Science and Research (IJSR)
ISSN (Online): 2319-7064
Index Copernicus Value (2013): 6.14 | Impact Factor (2014): 5.611
Sky. Capable of Satellite-Based Augmentation System estimate the current position of the bus. The second step is to
(SBAS) (Wide Area Augmentation System use the position estimate to predict the arrival time. The
(WAAS)/EGNOS (European Geostationary Navigation position-estimation component is a tracking problem, and the
Overlay Service)) and Low power control of Integral LNA travel-time prediction component is a statistical estimation
(Low Noise Amplifier)[3]. problem.[7]

Figure 2: GPS Receiver

2. GSM Technology
SIM300 is a Tri-band GSM/GPRS engine that works on Figure 3: Diagram of prediction algoithm
frequencies , DCS 1800 MHz, Personal Communication
System (PCS) 1900 MHz and Enhanced GSM (EGSM) 900 2. Trilateration (Triangulation)
MHz. SIM300 features GPRS multi-slot class 10/ class 8 GPS Triangulation Algorithm also known as Trilateration.
(optional) and supports the GPRS coding schemes CS-1, CS- Trilateration is the process of determining absolute or
2, CS-3 and CS-4. To get information in SIM card you can relative locations of points by measurement of distances,
use AT Command. Both 3.0V and 1.8V SIM Cards are using the geometry of circles, spheres or triangles. In
supported. An internal regulator in the module having addition to its interest as a geometric problem, trilateration
nominal voltage 2.8V is used to power the SIM interface. All does have practical applications in surveying and navigation,
the pins will be reset to as outputs driving will be low.[3] including Global Positioning Systems (GPS). In contrast to
triangulation, it does not involve the measurement of angles.
This process is used in getting the GPS co-ordinates.
6. Algorithms
1. AVL (Automatic Vehicle Location) 7. Design and Implementation
Automatic vehicle location (AVL) is a computer based
vehicle tracking system. The actual real time position of each We implement a prototype system on the Android platform
vehicle is determined and relayed to a control center. AVL with different types of mobile phones, and collect the real
systems include computer -aided dispatch software, mobile data over a 7-week period. We first present the experiment
data terminals, emergency alarms, and digital environment and methodology.[1] We test the performance
communications. of each system component individually to evaluate the
design feasibility. We test the bus detection technique and
What is AVL technology? route classification method . When we evaluate the whole
AVL systems use satellite and land communications to system performance, i.e., the accuracy of arrival time
display each vehicle's location, status, heading , speed on the predication , all the components are working together[2].
computer's screen.
A design of an embedded system which is used for tracking
Tracking Systems and positioning of any vehicle by using Global Positioning
There are two types of tracking systems System (GPS) and Global system for mobile communication
1) Passive Tracking (GSM) is proposed in this paper. For interfacing with various
It refers to stand-alone GPS Receivers, which stores data for hardware peripherals is used. To continuously monitor a
further process Passive Tracking systems are limited to moving Vehicle and report the status of the Vehicle on
vehicle tracking only. It stores the location, time, velocity demand an embedded unit is designed in the bus. For doing
and heading data. so hardware peripheral is interfaced serially to a GPS
Receiver and GSM Modem.[3]
2) Real Time Tracking
It is based on mobile stand-alone terminals which combine 8. Conclusion
GPS and GSM to transmit their position. The goal of the
algorithm presented here is to accurately predict transit We present a GPS based bus arrival time prediction system.
vehicle arrival times up to an hour in advance. Beyond the Primarily relying on inexpensive and widely available
primary goals, there is an additional set of constraints on the cellular signals, the proposed system provides cost-efficient
algorithm that are imposed to facilitate implementation of the solutions to the problem.This paper proposes the bus
algorithm in real-world systems. These additional constraints tracking and predicts the bus arrival time with a proposed
are: 1) the uncertainty in the arrival-time must be quantified, system in it. This system is turn on and uses i.e. self
2) the output of the algorithm must be synchronous, and 3) calibrating and works anywhere on earth and does not
lost or delayed data must be handled efficiently. Our require a laboratory or artificial environment. Having a GPS
prediction method is comprised of two sequential is truly an advantage you can determine your location,
components, as shown in Figure 3. The first step is to whether you are travelling locally or in a foreign land and if

Volume 5 Issue 1, January 2016

www.ijsr.net
Paper ID: NOV152627 124
Licensed Under Creative Commons Attribution CC BY
 International Journal of Science and Research (IJSR)
ISSN (Online): 2319-7064
Index Copernicus Value (2013): 6.14 | Impact Factor (2014): 5.611
you think you are lost, you can use your GPS receiver to
know your exact location.

9. Future Scope and Enhancement

Bus location and arrival time app in android can be used for
research purposes by organizations or institutions to learn
about what a person looks at most in a day. This can be used
to provide information specific to those area to the particular
customer on his/her next visit to the software.SMS can also
be sent to the user in case of App upgradation or any news
regarding bus services.

10. Acknowledgement
I would like to thanks Mrs.Deeksha Bhardwaj, Mrs.
Shubhangi Surywanshi and Mr. Mahesh Bhandari for her/his
guidance, support and valuable suggestion.

References
[1] Pengfei Zhou, Yuanqing Zheng and Mo Li,“How Long
toWait? Predicting Bus Arrival Time With Mobile
PhoneBased Participatory Sensing” ,IEEE, June 2014.
[2] RinorobinA , Thamaraimuthumani , “Predicting Bus
Arrival Time with Mobile Phone Based Participatory
Sensing”, IJAICE, April 2015.
[3] Sudhakar K N1, Rashmi K2,”Predicting the Bus Arrival
Time Using GPS and GSM Technology”,IJSR,May
2015.
[4] James Biagioni ,Tomas Gerlich , “EasyTracker:
Automatic Transit Tracking, Mapping, and Arrival Time
Prediction Using Smartphones”.
[5] Z. Wall, D. J. Dailey, ”An Algorithm for Predicting the
Arrival Time of Mass Transit Vehicles Using Automatic
Vehicle Location Data”.
[6] Y. Liu, L,“Mining frequent trajectory patterns for
activity monitoring using radio frequency tag arrays”.
[7] Amer Shalaby(University of Toronto) ,Ali Farhan(City
of Calgary),“Prediction Model of Bus Arrival and
Departure Times Using AVL and APC Data.
[8] Google Maps. http://maps.google.com.
[9] Bus Transport in Singapore [Online]
Available:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_transport_in
_Singapore.

Author Profile
Sandip Daphal received the B.E. degree in computer Engineering
from G.H Raisoni Institute of Engineering and Technology in 2015-
16, respectively

Anand Nerkar perceiving the B.E. degree in computer Engineering

from G.H Raisoni Institute of Engineering and Technology in 2015-
16, respectively.

Volume 5 Issue 1, January 2016

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Paper ID: NOV152627 125
Licensed Under Creative Commons Attribution CC BY