MTCroidThe Real-time Bus Route Information System for Mobile

Devices

(A Mobile Bus Application for the Android Platform.)

By: Md Shaukat Ali2010202032

MCA (Regular)

UNDER THE GUIDANCE OFDr. P. Geetha

Assistant ProfessorDepartment Of Information Science & Technology

Anna University

Project Type: Internal

Page 1

ABSTRACT

In recent years we have seen an explosion in Smartphone ownership. Along with this

increase in ownership comes the opportunity to utilize to sensory inputs of these devices in

order to make our lives simpler and to allow us to get through our days more efficiently. One

widely used input for mobile applications is GPS (Global Positioning System) location. This

in combination with Google Maps for example provides a great opportunity to provide the

user with rich location specific data. This project aims to use both GPS location and Google

Maps in the development of an Android application for the Metropolitan Transport

Corporation (MTC) Chennai.

The Metropolitan Transport Corporation (formerly known as Pallavan Transport

Corporation) sometimes known as the MTC, is the agency that operates the public

transport bus service in Chennai, India. It operates in an area of 3929 square kilometre. As of

2012, the corporation operates 42,961 services daily in 800 routes .Buses transportation

System is one of the busiest system in Chennai. The MTC alone carries around 5 million

passengers per day. Although it provides service with efficiency to citizens in Chennai,

people still come across the time when they miss a bus and spend a long time queuing at the

bus stops. The bus arrival time is primary information to most city transport travellers.

Excessively long waiting time at bus stops often discourages the travellers and makes them

reluctant to take buses.

As from the MTC Chennai sources approx 1000 buses are equipped with GPS, especially

buses of popular routes. Based on this data I proposed an android based application which

show a dynamic timetable for the route at the bus stop and show the locations in Google

map .Now a days substantial numbers of smart phones user would use 3G technology to get

fast access to Internet as well the facilities of Geo-locating came with almost all smart

phones. The project is aiming to implement a bus arrival predictor on the platform of Google

Android that can provide relevant bus route information with bus arrival time to users. The

calculation will be done on the server side and the processed data will be retrieved and

presented to the user’s mobile phones. The project explored the great flexibility and

capability of Google Android mobile phones.

Page 2

ANDROID ACTIVITY LIFECYCLE

SYSTEM GOALS AND OBJECTIVES :

The overall system is broken down into components to achieve the following objectives-

Develop an application showing a dynamic timetable for a route at a bus stop.

Show bus locations on a Google Map. It should automatically refresh the locations.

Make use of devices with GPS chips to find stops near a user.

Make an attractive and user friendly interface.

Create an HTTP based API for use by the Android client.

Page 3

MOBILE

SERVER

GPS

INTERNET

1.GPS API

2. CLIENTAPPLICATION

3.WEB SERVICE

4.SERVER APPLICATION

5.RESOURCES

6.Google Maps API

7.Google Geocoding API

8.MTC Database

The first two goals in my opinion are most important. The application should be fast and the

data provided by a simple uncluttered interface to provide a good user experience. This is the

purpose of an application; to provide the user with valuable information with the least

amount of work on their part.

OVERALL SYSTEM DESIGN:

This project was divided into three main components. They are list below:

1. The MTCRoid client.

This is what the user interacts with. It has to be quick and simple to use.

The user should not be concerned about any other components making up

the system. To them this is the entire application.

2. The MTCRoid Server:

This is a server written in Java. It provides a RESTful API, used to provide

information to the Android client using HTTP requests.

3. The MySQL database.

The MySQL database contains all the schedule data provided by MTC, all queryable.

SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE

Page 4

LITRATURE SURVEY

Reference Papers:

1. Reference Paper 1

Title: A prescription for transit arrival/departure prediction using automatic vehicle location

data

Author: F.W. Cathey, D.J. Dailey

Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Washington, Seattle,

Year: 2003

http://www.its.washington.edu/pubs/trc2003.pdf

This paper we present a general prescription for the prediction of transit vehicle

arrival/departure. This prescription uses a data flow approach and breaks the task of

predicting arrival/departure into several component parts. Each of these parts is realized as

software that implements an algorithm to accomplish the goals of that component

2.Refernce paper 2

Title: Prediction Model of Bus Arrival and Departure Times Using AVL and APC Data

Author: Amer Shalaby, University of Toronto Ali Farhan, City of Calgary

Year:2004

http://nctr.usf.edu/jpt/pdf/JPT%207-1%20Shalaby.pdf

The emphasis of this research effort was on using AVL and APC dynamic data to develop a

bus travel time model capable of providing real-time information on bus arrival and departure

times to passengers (via traveller information services) and to transit controllers for the

application of proactive control strategies. The developed model is comprised of two Kalman

filter algorithms for the prediction of running times and dwell times alternately in an

integrated framework.

Page 5

3. Reference Paper 3

Title: How Long to Wait?: Predicting Bus Arrival Time with Mobile Phone based Participatory Sensing Author: Pengfei Zhou, Yuanqing Zheng Mo Li Nanyang Technological University, SingaporeYear: 2012

http://www3.ntu.edu.sg/home/limo/papers/sys012fp.pdf

This paper present a bus arrival time prediction system based on bus passengers’

participatory sensing. With commodity mobile phones, the bus passengers’ surrounding

environmental context is electively collected and utilized to estimate the bus travelling routes

and predict bus arrival time at various bus stops. The proposed system solely relies on the

collaborative e ort of the participating users and is independent from the bus operatingff

companies, so it can be easily adopted to support universal bus service systems without

requesting support from particular bus operating companies.

Reference Websites :

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_Transport_Corporation_(Chennai)

Social Encyclopaedia

2. http://www.mtcbus.org/ MTC Chennai Website

3. https://play.google.com/store/search?q=Chennai+MTC&c=apps (List of previously

created apps)

4. http://www.livechennai.com/detailnews.asp?newsid=1609

5. http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2012-02-03/chennai/31020926_1_mtc-plans-

gps-system-21g

Page 6