This paper investigates time reliability at bus stops. Although it is typically evaluated from the transit provider's viewpoint, it must also account for passengers, as required in recent service-quality norms. Hence, data on both bus arrival (or departure) times and passenger arrivals must be collected and processed. Automated vehicle location (AVL) systems can collect bus data, but several challenges must be addressed to effectively use them. Passenger arrival data can be collected by surveys or direct observations and processed to derive patterns. This paper proposes two novel time reliability metrics: the percentage of passengers receiving regular service (PPR) and the percentage of passengers receiving punctual service (PPP) for regularity and punctuality evaluations, respectively. They are determined by a methodology that collects and handles AVL data, computes passenger patterns from passenger arrival data, and integrates AVL data and patterns. Experiments highlight the viability of the novel evaluation metrics using about three million of real-world AVL records. Their results are reported by straightforward Web tools. A comparison with traditional metrics shows that PPR and PPP provide a more careful evaluation by using the passenger as a normalization basis for their outcomes. In the new paradigm of demand-oriented services, the proposed metrics are crucial to quantify the ability of operators to serve passengers.
In this paper, we will illustrate how microservice architectures can be adopted to build Internet of Things services for multimobility in a smart city. Traditional centralized architectures are built as monolithic solutions, which lack the flexibility required to deal with heterogeneous devices efficiently. Microservice architectures implement small features bounded within a running process; independent microservices can be deployed separately in a distributed system. We have proposed a draft of architecture for general-purpose Internet of Things applications. Thanks to the choice of the microservice paradigm, the architecture is capable of interfacing with a wide range of heterogeneous IoT devices while implementing scalability by design. On this basis, a web application has been developed bearing in mind a set of real case scenarios mobility services for citizens multimobility in a smart city.
1 January 2013 in International Journal of Grid and Utility Computing
This paper is concerning issues regarding the semantic indexing of resources in a peer-to-peer network. An important requirement is a good quality of the discovery i.e. the selection of results very related to a specific request and a short response time. Keys used for indexing and the corresponding URLs of indexed resources are stored in a Distributed Hash Table DHT scattered among the different peers of a community. A key of indexing is a semantic description of resources and refers to elements belonging to ontologies of domain and to knowledge bases. We propose a model of indexing patterns in order to generate keys. It is used to guide users for producing assertions about their resources. It induces navigation inside ontologies presented in graphical user interfaces in a friendly and easy to use way. With different examples, we present the main cases of key generation that define the indexing context of a resource. We also describe experiments performed in test environments simulating various situations.
1 June 2010 in International Journal of Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering
In the past few years, the Smart City concept became one of the main driving forces for the transition towards sustainable economy and improved mobility. Tourism, as one of the fastest growing economies worldwide, is an integrated part of the Smart City paradigm. Taking into consideration recent studies performed by the United Nations, stating that almost one third of the population is directly affected by disability, the concept of Accessible Tourism needs also to be integrated in the future vision for tourism, especially in the context of Smart Cities, environments fully benefiting from the recent technological advances. Within the combined framework of Smart Cities and Accessible Tourism, the Internet-of-Things (IoT) concept is the key technological point for the development of smart urban environments. IoT and big data are both technology-driven developments, leading to scenarios such as the Smart Cities one that has the potential to make citizen live smarter, more sustainable and more accessible. This chapter analyses the key requirements for IoT applications in a Smart City context, the state-of-the-art for the use of IoT for Accessible Tourism applications and proposes an architecture together with its practical implementation, tailored for the use-case of accessible tourism for physically impaired persons.