SmartBusTraffic: Crowd Sourcing Bus Traffic Monitoring
Type: Bachelor thesis
Status: Running
Begin: From July 2015
Student: Fadi Sihwail
Tutor: Bashar Altakrouri
Supervisor: Prof. Dr.-Ing. Andreas Schrader
The Background
Today’s powerful mobile devices and software platforms provide exceptional foundations for wide-area context-aware computing; existing context-frameworks have demonstrated the strength of context sensing and various crowd sourcing project have illustrated the potential of integrating information gathered by ordinary users to provide services with minimal infrastructure needs and costs. Hence, new scenarios for smart cities are being increasingly investigated in various areas including engery-aware cities, friendly traffic, noise maps, etc.
At the ITM we are developing a new middleware for smart city app development based on OSGi. This development is part of several activities in the context of the BMBF-sponsored project ZukunftsWerkStadt II, which we are currently performing in cooperation with Fachhochschule Lübeck and organisations of the City of Lübeck (Wissenschaftsmanagement, Umweltamt).
Thesis Topic
The lack of open APIs for accessing traffic information in many cities hinders the possibility to investigate various smart city scenarios.This project will investigate the posibility to use commodity mobile devices and sensors to detect public transportation traffic in smart cities (focusing on bus traffic in the city of Luebeck as an example). By a crowd sourcing approach, an application should be developed to give users the chance to turn their mobile devices into sensors to detect and broadcast live automatically-detected information about bus traffic in the city. Additionally, the app should provide an interactive map and other facilities to view and interact with the information aggregated by the system.
This thesis should:
• Design an API for aggregating live traffic context information from handheld devices into the system.
• Access and integrate publicly available traffic information (i.e., traffic time sheets) into the system
• Extend the back-end for smart city crowd sourcing information developed by the SoundOfTheCity project (developed in the ITM).
• Design and implement a smart city application for live public traffic in Luebeck.
• Design an API for general access of information gathered by the system.
• Integrate the new functionality as part of the flexible OSGi-based SmartCity middleware currently developed at the ITM.
Fine Print
After introduction into the topic and implementation of the required tasks, a solid documentation has to be performed. The implemented code has to be completely commented and will be released under the Apache Open Source License. The rules for Writing Scientific Theses at the institute have to be followed.
