Participatory cyber physical system in public transport application

Abstract

Population in the urban areas around the world is increasing yet energy and natural resources which are non-renewable, have continued to deplete. This scenario leads us to the many challenges faced by public transportation since it is directly linked to urbanization. From a civilian point of view, proper travel planning and knowledge of others' travel experiences are useful in easing public transportation woes. We apply Cyber Physical System (CPS) within cyber-physical-socio space to make those capabilities possible. In this approach, we regard data as a service, data are contributed and queried by the public masses. Location and time represent the physical domain and data with information derived from them represent the digital domain in our CPS design. We designed and implemented a prototypical system named ContriSenseCloud that works based on client-server model. The system has two main distinctive platforms, namely Service Exchange Platform (SEP) and Application-specific Exchange Platform (AEP). The SEP is designed to be as generalizable as possible whereas AEP is where our current public transportation applications reside. Such architecture enables extensibility of ContriSenseCloud to other application domains. Other contributions include Restful Application Programming Interface (API) in CPS, near real-time sensing, and mapping of GPS readings to correct sequence of bus stops. © 2011 IEEE.