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Towards proximity-based passenger sensing on public transport buses

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Abstract

While substantial research on intelligent transportation systems has focused on the development of novel wireless communication technologies and protocols, relatively little work has sought to fully exploit proximity-based wireless technologies that passengers actually carry with them today. This paper presents the real-world deployment of a system that exploits public transit bus passengers’ Bluetooth-capable devices to capture and reconstruct micro- and macro-passenger behavior. We present supporting evidence that approximately 12 % of passengers already carry Bluetooth-enabled devices and that the data collected on these passengers captures with almost 80 % accuracy the daily fluctuation of actual passengers flows. The paper makes three contributions in terms of understanding passenger behavior: We verify that the length of passenger trips is exponentially bounded, the frequency of passenger trips follows a power law distribution, and the microstructure of the network of passenger movements is polycentric.

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Correspondence to Vassilis Kostakos.

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Kostakos, V., Camacho, T. & Mantero, C. Towards proximity-based passenger sensing on public transport buses. Pers Ubiquit Comput 17, 1807–1816 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00779-013-0652-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00779-013-0652-4

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