BUSTRAP – An Efficient Travel Planner for Metropolitans

Abstract

In this paper, we are providing a solution for an efficient and up-to-date commuting planner for a public transport system used by masses. Here, we present design and implementation features of a proposed system to be used for planning a bus travel. This problem is relevant to a large metropolitan city, like New Delhi, where local bus service forms the life-line of the city. There are about 10,000 city buses running on 814 routes on Delhi’s roads. Often, there are many ways to reach a destination and often, commuters, even locals, do not possess knowledge about most of these alternate routes. Also, buses do not adhere to their schedules due to heavy traffic.Thus it becomes very difficult to remember every possible way to reach a destination (considering that one may have to break one’s journey and take another route to reach the destination).

Proposed BUSTRAP [1] solution aims at providing fairly accurate information about optimal way to reach a particular destination. Though we have implemented BUSTRAP as an SMS service, it can easily beadapted for other services like IVRS, WAP etc. stating one’s current location and desired destination. The system will provide optimal ways to reach that place by bus – telling exact bus routes and numbers to board/change according to the bus movement on the city roads at that time. We record location of buses at a few instances on the roads through sensors. Our system finds their current location and speculates future locations based on these real time records. We identify changeover points on a route according to which a route plan would be formed.