An Architecture for Monitoring and Improving Public Transportation Systems

Brazilian public transportation systems are facing a significant demand reduction, mainly due to the poor quality of the offered services, lack of information regarding lines and timetables, high cost and lack of investment from the government. Even though it is not trivial to improve financial aspects related to the public transportation system, this work claims that the overall system quality can be improved through ubiquitous data collection according to a proposed ontology, which is the basis for knowledge extraction to support the required quality of experience improvements. The proposed architecture relies on standard technologies available nowadays, providing a low cost solution for the required data collection and analysis. This paper presents the proposed inter-networking architecture and ontology, then evaluates the system performance using a prototype developed with standard solutions.