BusesinRio: Buses as Mobile Traffic Sensors: Managing the Bus GPS Data in the City of Rio de Janeiro

The main input data for a traffic management system are trajectories generated by active GPS devices installed in vehicles. In this case, such trajectories can be understood as mobile traffic sensors. A vehicle raw trajectory may be considered as a continuous data stream generated by a GPS device, installed in the vehicle, that continuously transmit its position. In some cities, such as the City of Rio de Janeiro, each bus circulating in the city has to be equipped with such device. Using this fact, the City Hall of Rio de Janeiro offers a public Web service that publishes, at about every minute, the current GPS position of all buses. However, this public data service offers only the instantaneous data, in other words, there is no historical data available. For this reason, it is necessary to develop another service that periodically queries this data and stores its entries for future processing and for useful applications, such as traffic analysis and planning. The objective of this paper is to present the Buses In Rio tool that implements this functionality and provides access to bus trajectory data since June, 2014. The current database has approximately 2 billion GPS samples.