SmartBus: An IoT-Based Smart Transport Scheduling and Seat Availability System

Abstract

Rapid urbanization and the increased utilization of public buses have made the process of finding available seats difficult for commuters. Overcrowding in buses affects passenger comfort and safety, and traditional methods of monitoring bus occupancy are not effective. Herein, the authors propose a low-cost sensor-based Arduino UNO and IR/ultrasonic sensor-based system to detect passengers boarding and alighting a bus, and maintaining a count in real time for determining seat availability using LEDs/LCD for display. It is non-intrusive to personal space, inexpensive, and hence easy to deploy compared to manual counting or camera-based solutions. Its further extension could be made by implementing the Wi-Fi module for uploading occupancy data to mobile applications for real-time updates and analytics.

Keywords - Bus Occupancy, Passenger Counting, Embedded Systems, Arduino, Sensor-based Monitoring, Public Transport