An effective tracking technique of public transportation toward passenger generated vehicle location system

This paper proposes an automatic vehicle locating (AVL) system which gains the geographic location data of a vehicle by passengers' sending the data via their smartphones in order to support public transportation users. While the existing AVL systems with specialized facilities costs a large amount of money and currently only large cities can introduce the system to their public transportation system, such user-generated approach will reduce the costs to collect the location data of a vehicle, and will enable small transportation system to adopt an AVL system. This paper developed a matching technique of location with a timetable, and demonstrated the system in the route buses in Tottori Prefecture with 70 smart phones, and evaluated its performance.