Copyright © 2007 The Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers
Regular Section -- Papers -- Distributed Cooperation and Agents |
ACE-INPUTS: A Cost-Effective Intelligent Public Transportation System*
1 The author is with TmaxSoft Co., Ltd., 2 Corresponding author. The author is with the Department of Computer Science, Yonsei University, Korea. E-mail: sanghyun{at}cs.yonsei.ac.kr, 3 The author is with Google, Korea., 4 The author is with College of Information and Communications, Hanyang University, Korea.
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Abstract |
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With the rapid adoption of mobile devices and location based services (LBS), applications provide with nearby information like recommending sightseeing resort are becoming more and more popular. In the mean time, traffic congestion in cities led to the development of mobile public transportation systems. In such applications, mobile devices need to communicate with servers via wireless communications and servers should process queries from tons of devices. However, because users can not neglect the payment for the wireless communications and server capacities are limited, decreasing the communications made between central servers and devices and reducing the burden on servers are quite demanding. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a cost-effective intelligent public transportation system, ACE-INPUTS, which utilizes a mobile device to retrieve the bus routes to reach a destination from the current location at the lowest wireless communication cost. To accomplish this task, ACE-INPUTS maintains a small amount of information on bus stops and bus routes in a mobile device and runs a heuristic routing algorithm based on such information. Only when a user asks more accurate route information or calls for a "leave later query", ACE-INPUTS entrusts the task to a server into which real-time traffic and bus location information is being collected. By separating the roles into mobile devices and servers, ACE-INPUTS is able to provide bus routes at the lowest wireless communication cost and reduces burden on servers. Experimental results have revealed that ACE-INPUTS is effective and scalable in most experimental settings.
Key Words: mobile public transportation system, heuristic routing algorithm, location-based services
Manuscript received June 15, 2006. Manuscript revised March 23, 2007.
* This research was partially supported by the MIC, Korea, under the ITRC support program supervised by the IITA (IITA-2005-C1090-0502-0009) and by the research fund of Hanyang University (HY-2005-1).