A Method of Designing an Intelligent Public Transportation System in Metropolitan Area Using Emergent Intelligence

Abstract

Metropolitan area consists of huge population density, one or more urban areas, satellite cities, rural areas and towns. It highly concentrates economic activities to attract people from rural areas and is a complex spatial structures and reached a milestone in the development of road infrastructure to support transportation systems. Due to increase in the number of vehicles, many traffic related problems have arised, such as increase in delays, wastage of resources, high traffic accidents, economic losses, environmental pollution, security, privacy, etc. These problems are solved by using Intelligent Public Transportation System (IPTS), which consists of advanced technologies for transportation engineering including information technology (IT), computational intelligence, system control technology and system engineering. These advanced technologies play significant role in reducing traffic congestion, traffic accidents, traffic pollution, energy consumption and improving road traffic safety. In this thesis, we have designed IPTS for public transport in a metropolitan area. It consists of 5 major functional units, such as commuters arrival prediction, transport resource allocation, privacy preservation, context-based service management and transport management. We have used Emergent Intelligence (EI) technique with agents, as it is efficiently used, in several applications for collecting, analyzing, monitoring, and sharing information. Also, it takes dynamic decisions to give independence to each agent to take a decision. Some of these features are essential for public transport system. First, we have designed Commuters Arrival Prediction (CAP) scheme, which analyzes and predicts commuters patterns in the bus station using commuters arrival density, resource availability, history, and dynamic arrivals of commuters and vehicles. The proposed scheme provides an accurate analysis and prediction of commuters arrival density pattern at each bus station in the vicinity of transport depot...