SMARTBUS: A Web Application for Smart Urban Mobility and Transportation

Systematic evaluation is crucial to the management and development of smart urban transportation, as it allows transportation planners to better understand the impact of their decisions and design targeted interventions to improve efficiency. Implementation of smart and adaptable public transportation is an important challenge in developing cities and newly industrialized economies where growth characteristics contribute to and can be impacted by factors like overcrowding and travel delays. In this paper, we focus on bus transportation, and present the design and implementation of a 3-layer web-based system for performance evaluation and decision support. This is part of a "Smart Cities"initiative, which is an international collaboration between academia and government. The first layer estimates fundamental indicators such as bus travel time and passenger demands by integrating heterogeneous data sources. A novel bus-stop network is then designed in the second layer, which enables the derivation of passenger patterns in public transit using network analysis. The third layer provides decision support by analyzing causal relationships between indicators. The proposed web-based system called SMARTBUS is being developed and validated with the city of Fortaleza in Brazil. We believe the use of generally available urban transportation data makes our methodology adaptable and customizable for other cities.