Estimating Congestion in a Fixed-Route Bus by Using BLE Signals

Yuji Kanamitsu, Eigo Taya, Koki Tachibana, Yugo Nakamura, Yuki Matsuda, Hirohiko Suwa, Keiichi Yasumoto: “Estimating Congestion in a Fixed-Route Bus by Using BLE Signals,” Sensors, Vol.22, No.3:881, pp.1-15, 2022.

Abstract

Information on congestion of buses, which are one of the major public transportation modes, can be very useful in light of the current COVID-19 pandemic. Because it is unrealistic to manually monitor the number of riders on all buses in operation, a system that can automatically monitor congestion is necessary. The main goal of this paper's work is to automatically estimate the congestion level on a bus route with acceptable performance. For practical operation, it is necessary to design a system that does not infringe on the privacy of passengers and ensures the safety of passengers and the installation sites. In this paper, we propose a congestion estimation system that protects passengers' privacy and reduces the installation cost by using Bluetooth low-energy (BLE) signals as sensing data. The proposed system consists of (1) a sensing mechanism that acquires BLE signals emitted from passengers' mobile terminals in the bus and (2) a mechanism that estimates the degree of congestion in the bus from the data obtained by the sensing mechanism. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed system, we conducted a data collection experiment on an actual bus route in cooperation with Nara Kotsu Co., Ltd. The results showed that the proposed system could estimate the number of passengers with a mean absolute error of 2.49 passengers (error rate of 38.8%).

Links

DOI: https://doi.org/10.3390/s22030881

PDF: https://yukimat.jp/data/pdf/paper/BLECE-Bus_j_202201_kanamitsu_mdpiSensors.pdf

BibTeX

code:references.bib

@article{bib:kanamitsu_busCrowdedness_mdpiSensors2022,

author={Kanamitsu, Yuji and Taya, Eigo and Tachibana, Koki and Nakamura, Yugo and Matsuda, Yuki and Suwa, Hirohiko and Yasumoto, Keiichi},

title={Estimating Congestion in a Fixed-Route Bus by Using BLE Signals},

journal={Sensors},

volume={22},

number={3},

year={2022},

pages={1--15},

doi={10.3390/s22030881},

url={https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/22/3/881},

article-number={881}

}

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