Sustainable transit vehicle tracking service, using intelligent transportation system services and emerging communication technologies: A review

The most salient problems of transit vehicle service in Latin American intermediate cities include: the high number of passengers involved in traffic accidents; traffic congestion caused by transit vehicles, and pollution generated by these vehicles, which increases in high congestion scenarios. To improve upon this situation, a research was conducted on the transit vehicle tracking service, which is a basic service for implementing mobility solutions for the aforementioned problems, the most relevant characteristics of this service for the context of Latin American intermediate cities were identified, and an implementation was proposed. This paper presents the four stages of the study: (a) a review of the state-of-the-art of services or systems related to vehicle tracking, including wireless communications technologies, implemented sustainability approaches, usage of special algorithms for efficiency improvement, and the intelligent transportation system (ITS) architecture used as a basis; (b) the process of identifying relevant characteristics of the service for a given context; (c) proposal of an ITS architecture for this service in an intermediate city, its requirements and the suggested technologies; and (d) development of experiments for validating usage of the key suggested technologies. The review allowed to identify the main service characteristics, with regard to vehicle positioning technologies, the recommended wireless communication technology (long range, LoRa), energy consumption considerations, and use of artificial intelligence (AI) to calculate waiting time of users at bus stops. Finally, an ITS architecture for the city of Popayán (Colombian city) considering the aforementioned characteristics is proposed, and the experiments related to the use of these technologies are described in detail.