Dynamic Public Transit Routing: Matt Weber, CP8900, May 2008
These days personal GPS-based navigation devices have made driving more convenient, by giving users real-time directions to their destinations, and even correcting them dynamically when a wrong turn is taken. There is no technological barrier that prevents this same technology from being applied to public transportation. With such an application in place users could enjoy an enhanced sense of freedom and confidence when taking public transportation. This is the motivation for the project described below. Such an application is too complex to implement in a single semester. However two fundamental components were not, a mobile remote tracking application and an integrated transit routing application.
The remote tracking application will allow the user’s mobile device to periodically upload their location to a remote server. Although tracking the user remotely is not necessary to achieve the desired functionality, doing so removes much of the computation from the mobile device as well as could allow transportation planners vital information to help improve efficiency of their transit system. The tracking application has three major components, a mobile app, a web service, and a database. The mobile app is written in J2ME, mobile Java, and employs a distance based dead-reckoning (DR) bandwidth reduction scheme. The web service is written in Java and was tested on an Apache Tomcat servlet engine. The database is written in MySQL.
The routing component allows the server to report an optimal route based on user input. All the tools required to implement this component can be found in the ArcGIS Tracking Analyst extension. After acquiring the route and stop information from the parking office, and formatting it to ESRI compatible datasets, a routing network was generated that can give shortest routes for a given source and destination. This network can now be hosted as a web service from ArcGIS Server.
