A Public Transport Bus as a Flexible Mobile Smart Environment Sensing Platform for IoT

Abstract

In this paper we present the requirements, design and pre-deployment testing of a transportation bus as a Mobile Enterprise Sensor Bus (M-ESB) service in China that supports two main requirements: to monitor the urban physical environment, and to monitor road conditions. Although, several such projects have been proposed previously, integrating both environment and road condition monitoring and using a data exchange interface to feed a data cloud computing system, is a novel approach. We present the architecture for M-ESB and in addition propose a new management model for the bus company to act as a Virtual Mobile Service Operator. Pre-deployment testing was undertaken to validate our system

WSN Hardware for Automotive Applications: Preliminary Results for the Case of Public Transportation

“…To date, several different types of nodes and WSNs for various applications were developed and investigated [10][11][12][13][14][15][16]18,21]. To be cost-effective, recently the SBC employed for WSN nodes in automotive are open-hardware solutions, such as Arduino, Raspberry, or others.…”

“…Indeed, in the ITS framework, data derived from such heterogeneous quantities are combined and integrated to develop a real-time information system or to devise intelligent feedback strategies [8]. For example, the monitoring of temperature, relative humidity, and cinematic parameter can be exploited to setup a smart system for improving the quality of passenger during the route [11]. In this work, relative humidity, temperature, and acceleration are employed to setup a real-time information system which can send alert messages to the driver or the public transportation technicians, as shown in Figures 1 and 2.…”

Cyber–Physical–Social Frameworks for Urban Big Data Systems: A Survey

“…Similar initiatives have been adopted in Madrid [81], where pollen sensors have been mounted on public transport buses. Mobile sensors mounted on buses have also been deployed in a city in China [15], that monitor both urban physical environment and road conditions. The corresponding data are stored in databases and retrieved in XML format, containing the following fields: bus ID, bus line, temperature, humidity, speed, latitude, longitude, tested data, tested time and illumination data.…”

“…The high installation cost of fixed sensor networks and insufficient spatial coverage has led to mobile sensing initiatives, primarily by city authorities [13], which involve sensors mounted on public transportation vehicles (e.g., for environment monitoring [14][15][16]). …”

“…The corresponding data collection mechanisms cover a wide range, including data upload and retrieval from sensor gateways through Representational State Transfer (RESTful) Application Programming Interface (API) [60] or Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) [61], opportunistic data transmission from mobile sensors [15,62], such as those mounted on public transport vehicles. User-contributed data involves citizens explicitly uploading data from their sensor-rich mobile phones as well as urban data information extracted from online social networks.…”