Systems trying to solve mobility issues in cities, such as high levels of accidents and traffic congestion, have been developed worldwide. Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) services focused on urban public transport are an option contributing to solve such issues. A few intermediate cities in the Latin American context have developed some of these ITS services, which are mainly based on a tracking system for public transport vehicles. Such tracking systems have great limitations in terms of coverage, availability, and operational cost. In addition, they are commonly isolated mobility solutions, which cannot be easily integrated with other mobility services in the city because they are not based on an ITS architecture. In order to improve public transportation systems in intermediate cities, we proposed the development of an IoT-based public vehicle tracking system, using LoRa (Long Range) and ITS services. In this research, we developed the proposed system as a proof of concept. We designed and executed some experiments, in order to adjust parameters of the LoRa technology and to test its operation. This article presents the methods we followed for developing the proof-of-concept model, a description of the experiments, and their results. The results lead to conclude that the LoRa technology and an IoT-based system are adequate for implementation of a mobility service such as the one we propose, once important technical restrictions related mainly to Line of Sight (LoS) are considered. Key aspects for implementation were also identified for deploying the service (as a prototype) in the city of Popayán.

In medium-sized cities in developing countries, transit services without dedicated lanes have issues related to route compliance, schedules, speed control, and safety. An efficient way for dealing with this issue is the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), to implement a Fleet Management and Control Systems (FMCS). Such implementation can be performed using Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSs), which allow integration of services and adequate standardization. This article features: (a) a literature review, related to FMCS based on ITS and enabling technologies, (b) design of the ITS architecture of an FMCS, and (c) some advances in the development of the proposed FMCS in a Colombian city (Popayán). The results of the literature review allowed identifying the most important requirements of FMCS in order to design the ITS architecture and build a prototype featuring the suggested technologies. Finally, some experiments were performed to evaluate the operation of the developed prototype. The results showed evidence of adequate operation in sending and receiving messages from and to four prototypes developed for the vehicles, also complying with the established requirements of location, tracking, exchanged data, and security. This allows continuing the development of the proposed FMCS, with some adjustments.

Traffic congestion has several causes, including insufficient road capacity, unrestricted demand and improper scheduling of traffic signal phases. A great variety of efforts have been made to properly program such phases. Some of them are based on traditional transportation assumptions, and others are adaptive, allowing the system to learn the control law (signal program) from data obtained from different sources. Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a technique commonly used in previous research. However, properly determining the states and the reward is key to obtain good results and to have a real chance to implement it. This paper proposes and implements a traffic signal control system (TSCS), detailing its development stages: (a) Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) architecture design for the TSCS; (b) design and development of a system prototype, including an RL algorithm to minimize the vehicle queue at intersections, and detection and calculation of such queues by adapting a computer vision algorithm; and (c) design and development of system tests to validate operation of the algorithms and the system prototype. Results include the development of the tests for each module (vehicle queue measurement and RL algorithm) and real-time integration tests. Finally, the article presents a system simulation in the context of a medium-sized city in a developing country, showing that the proposed system allowed reduction of vehicle queues by 29%, of waiting time by 50%, and of lost time by 50%, when compared to fixed phase times in traffic signals.

Long-range (LoRa) technology is a low power wide area network (LPWAN) technology that is currently being used for development of Internet of things (IoT)-based solutions. Transit transport, mainly in medium-sized cities where transit vehicles do not have exclusive lanes, is a service that can be improved with a tracking service using technology such as LoRa. Although some proposals exist, there is not enough experimental information to validate the LoRa technology as adequate. This article: (a) evaluates the operation of LoRa technology in a transit vehicle tracking service in a medium-sized city, based on an Intelligent Transportation Systems architecture and IoT; and (b) investigates optimal LoRa technology configuration parameters for the service. Experiments were performed in a semi-controlled environment using LoRa devices and a gateway, by measuring the received packets and the receive signal strength indicator (RSSI) and modifying: (a) distance; (b) number of devices; and (c) the main LoRa transmission parameters. Obtained results show the ideal values of parameters vary considerably with distance and number of devices used. There were very few settings of the experiments in which the RSSI and packet levels were adequate while distance and number of devices were both changed.

In the last ten years, approximately, urban transit systems of Latin American capital cities have evolved significantly. Colombia, specifically, has concentrated this development in its capital cities, consolidated through digital transformation programs in the transportation sector. However, the same phenomenon does not occur in medium-sized cities for different reasons that are important to analyze. This paper presents an exploratory qualitative study involving eight medium-sized cities in the implementation phase of their strategic urban transit systems. Three main aspects that drive this study were identified: technologies and their cost, functional requirements to implement information technology services in transit systems, and economy and administration associated with this type of implementation. Based on this, a semi-structured interview data collection instrument was designed, with the participation of 15 officials distributed in the eight target cities, and one expert from an intelligent transportation system in a capital city. With the information collected, an exploratory analysis was made contrasting the responses given by each interviewee. The most relevant results show that the interviewees prioritize technologies based on open standards to provide information to users; that the northern medium-sized cities of the country do not have strategies that regularize and motivate the use of public transportation; instead, the southern medium-sized cities of the country consider the use of transportation to be necessary. Finally, it was concluded that the information technology services to be included in the provision of transit services should promote these cities’ cultural and economic growth.

The transit service in a city should be the most efficient, least polluting, most accessible, and sustainable means of transportation for its citizens. However, serious shortcomings have been detected, mainly in medium-sized cities in developing countries. These shortcomings are related to a lack of user information, insecurity, low service availability, and repeated stops in inappropriate and/or unauthorized places. Some of these shortcomings contribute to high accident rates and traffic congestion. The development of tools to improve the characteristics and conditions of transit service in cities has become an imperative need to improve the quality of life of citizens and city sustainability. Transit service tracking is relevant in aspects such as online location information to travelers and control by transport companies for compliance with speed limits, schedules, routes, and stops. This research proposes a transit vehicle tracking system based on the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) in Vehicle-to-Roadside (V2R) classification. The proposed system is ideal for the use of electric vehicles due to the low power consumption of the tracking device. This system uses Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) tracking service architecture, Long Range (LoRa) communication technology, and its LoRa Wide Area Network (LoRaWAN) protocol. Additionally, the system offers real-time location prediction in the absence of position data. The IoV tracking device integrates a GPS-LoRa module card with an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU). A location prediction algorithm was implemented to train and store a prediction model with previously collected data from tracking devices. To evaluate the developed model, a case study in the city of Popayán (Colombia) was implemented, using three routes for testing. The results of the system implementation were satisfactory, obtaining an average coverage of 60.4% of the routes in the final field tests through LoRa communication. For the remaining 39.6% of the routes, location data prediction was used, with an average accuracy of 177 m with respect to the real location. Considering the obtained results, a tracking system such as the one proposed in this article can be used in the transit systems of medium-sized cities in developing countries to improve service quality and fleet control.