SMARTUS – Smart Bus for Live Tracking, Distributive Monitoring and Intelligent Prediction

The blog post comes as a congratulatory message for the achievements of my students Mr. Hannan Satopay, Ms. Devashree Vaishnav and Ms. Surekha Salunkhe who have participated in the India Innovation Challenge Design Contest 2018 and reached till the Quarter Finals. I believe that the project idea that they had in mind was quite innovative and thus in this post, I have called upon them to share the details.

Proposed Project Details

The cities of India have a vast network of Public Transportation system. The bus being the lifeline serves an important purpose for the daily commute of lakhs of people. Even though it is one of the solutions to curb pollution and reduce traffic intensity, it still has some inherent issues that lead to people adopting a different means of transport such as their own private car. The proposed project intends to solve the issues related to bus public transport and improving the situation by allowing live tracking of the bus from their nearby bus stop and get an estimated time of arrival. It will also be possible to enhance the proposed project to allow for detecting how crowdy the bus is and relay this information to the travelers. The government transportation agencies can also track the buses live and the data will help them make informed decisions to adjust the timings and number of buses to the optimum level.

A lot of accidents have been reported involving government buses. Through the proposed project we are aiming to monitor the driving behavior and extract parameters such as – rash driving behavior, the crossing of the speed limit, braking behavior, lane changing behavior as well as check for driver drowsiness. All these data will also be subsequently sent to the cloud to perform machine learning and map accident hotspots allowing for intelligent prediction.

The bus system can cover major of the roads of a city and thus there is an opportunity to use it for distributive monitoring.  Through the sensors fitted on each of the buses in the form of the proposed project, the government agencies can get data related to – weather, traffic condition, road health (example potholes) and many more. The data from all the buses can be combined to get a complete and real-time overview of the entire city.

The proposed solution will ultimately lead to the improvement in the adoption of public transport leading to a smaller number of vehicles on the road thereby reducing the traffic congestion and pollution. It will also allow for obtaining intelligent prediction through driving behavior and live traffic conditions which will allow the government agencies to improve and manage the system and reach its optimum level. The proposed project provides live monitoring of the entire city thereby allowing for distributive monitoring. The project solves many problems through a single implementation and being modular, the number of benefits is endless. It also provides people to come up with innovative scenarios and parameters and will also allow for people to use data science and machine learning over the obtained data to provide innovative insights.

Even though similar projects have been proposed in the past, the functionalities they provide have often been limited. The key focus area of those products was only on certain parameters. But our approach is an integrated and real-time approach. Our product allows the combination of data to provide primary parameters that can be used in real-time and secondary parameters that are sent to the cloud for analysis and intelligent prediction. We plan to use a single product on a bus to provide as much information as possible instead of multiple products providing separate functionality.

Business Video

Hannan Satopay’s Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hannansatopay/