Arrival time estimation system based on massive positioning data of public transport vehicles

Abstract

Nowadays the public transport systems play a main role in the advanced societies. How to evaluate the quality of the public transport is a critic task of the transport regulatory agencies. One indicator used to measure this quality is the fulfilment of the scheduled operation by the transport operators, specially scheduled arrival times and frequencies at stops. In this paper, an automatic system to estimate arrival times in the context of road public transport is proposed. The system works autonomously, acquiring massive vehicle position readings, registering and processing them automatically in order to estimate arrival times. This autonomous behaviour is achieved using pattern recognition and statistical techniques. To illustrate the application of the system, the estimation of arrival times at a bus stop is presented.