Systems trying to solve mobility issues in cities, such as high levels of accidents and traffic congestion, have been developed worldwide. Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) services focused on urban public transport are an option contributing to solve such issues. A few intermediate cities in the Latin American context have developed some of these ITS services, which are mainly based on a tracking system for public transport vehicles. Such tracking systems have great limitations in terms of coverage, availability, and operational cost. In addition, they are commonly isolated mobility solutions, which cannot be easily integrated with other mobility services in the city because they are not based on an ITS architecture. In order to improve public transportation systems in intermediate cities, we proposed the development of an IoT-based public vehicle tracking system, using LoRa (Long Range) and ITS services. In this research, we developed the proposed system as a proof of concept. We designed and executed some experiments, in order to adjust parameters of the LoRa technology and to test its operation. is article presents the methods we followed for developing the proof-of-concept model, a description of the experiments, and their results. e results lead to conclude that the LoRa technology and an IoT-based system are adequate for implementation of a mobility service such as the one we propose, once important technical restrictions related mainly to Line of Sight (LoS) are considered. Key aspects for implementation were also identified for deploying the service (as a prototype) in the city of Popayán.

In medium-sized cities in developing countries, transit services without dedicated lanes have issues related to route compliance, schedules, speed control, and safety. An efficient way for dealing with this issue is the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), to implement a Fleet Management and Control Systems (FMCS). Such implementation can be performed using Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSs), which allow integration of services and adequate standardization. This article features: (a) a literature review, related to FMCS based on ITS and enabling technologies, (b) design of the ITS architecture of an FMCS, and (c) some advances in the development of the proposed FMCS in a Colombian city (Popayán). The results of the literature review allowed identifying the most important requirements of FMCS in order to design the ITS architecture and build a prototype featuring the suggested technologies. Finally, some experiments were performed to evaluate the operation of the developed prototype. The results showed evidence of adequate operation in sending and receiving messages from and to four prototypes developed for the vehicles, also complying with the established requirements of location, tracking, exchanged data, and security. This allows continuing the development of the proposed FMCS, with some adjustments.

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Public transport vehicles are involved in a high percentage of traffic accidents in intermediate cities, mainly due to speeding and lack of control over their routing. In addition, many passengers of these vehicles report poor quality of service. To try to improve this, the authors propose a system to provide a public transport vehicle tracking service with high quality regarding accessibility, safety, and comfort. They developed an ITS architecture for this type of city following a methodology, they constructed a detailed service diagram using the ITS architecture and quality requirements, and finally, they selected the adequate wireless communication technology for the service. They determined that an IoT-based system, with LoRaWAN technology and considering the developed ITS architecture, provides the service with the required characteristics. They also analyzed the use of the proposed service design in the case of an intermediate Colombian city, determining the required components, network, and budget.

Long-range (LoRa) technology is a low power wide area network (LPWAN) technology that is currently being used for development of Internet of things (IoT)-based solutions. Transit transport, mainly in medium-sized cities where transit vehicles do not have exclusive lanes, is a service that can be improved with a tracking service using technology such as LoRa. Although some proposals exist, there is not enough experimental information to validate the LoRa technology as adequate. This article: (a) evaluates the operation of LoRa technology in a transit vehicle tracking service in a medium-sized city, based on an Intelligent Transportation Systems architecture and IoT; and (b) investigates optimal LoRa technology configuration parameters for the service. Experiments were performed in a semi-controlled environment using LoRa devices and a gateway, by measuring the received packets and the receive signal strength indicator (RSSI) and modifying: (a) distance; (b) number of devices; and (c) the main LoRa transmission parameters. Obtained results show the ideal values of parameters vary considerably with distance and number of devices used. There were very few settings of the experiments in which the RSSI and packet levels were adequate while distance and number of devices were both changed.