Smart Bus Route Monitoring System for Federal University of Technology, Minna, Niger State

Abstract

Transportation between both university campuses of Federal University of Technology, Minna (FUT Minna) has become a tedious and tiring activity because of the existing disconnect between the university’s transport system and the commuters due to the rapid increase in student population. The major factor responsible for this disconnect is the information gap between the passengers and the bus(es) en-route. This study therefore, proposes to bridge this gap by designing and implementing a system to monitor and estimate the time of arrival of buses via installed GPS tracking units, and relay the information over GSM/GPRS connection to a cloud server which processes and relays the information to waiting passengers via installed audio and video systems at a designated bus park, and a cross-platform Smartphone application to track the live-location and query bus(es) en-route using Here Maps Application Programming interface (API). The system is coordinated by Arduino microcontrollers and the strong cohesion between obtained and calculated Estimated Time of Arrivals (ETAs) prove the efficiency of the designed system, in helping commuters make better decisions