Designing an Intelligent Real-Time Public Transportation Monitoring System Based on IoT

In recent years, smart public transportation has become one of the most important things for developing cities and improving people’s quality of life. Public transportation users face many problems, the most important of which is the long wait at the bus station. The proposed system in this paper helps users of public transportation to find public transportation, arrival times, and other information from any place and at any time using a mobile application. The main objective of the prototype is to reduce the wait time at the bus station by knowing the nearest buses to a user, the real-time location of buses on the Google map to help passengers track buses in real-time, the arrival time of buses, and speed. The system was implemented based on Internet of Things (IoT) technology, by using the Global Positioning System (GPS), a microcontroller with a built-in Wi-Fi module (ESP32), and a mobile user interface by the Blynk IoT platform. The proposed system has been implemented and tested in real-time, where all data obtained is displayed by the GPS sensors for bus locations (longitude and latitude) and speed on the smartphone application. The distance between the bus location and the passenger that will appear in the mobile app was calculated by using the Haversine formula. It measured the accuracy of the distance obtained based on a study of several days at different times on multiple roads in Mosul city and compared it with the actual distance. The average difference between the calculated values computed by the Haversine equation compared to the data obtained from the actual distance is (177 meters) with a minimum error of 8 meters. The arrival time of each bus was calculated based on the distance and average speed of the bus registered along the road.