"ANALYSIS OF LOW-COST BLUETOOTH-PLUS-WIFI DEVICE FOR TRAVEL TIME RESEAR" by Ernest Tufuor and Laurence Rilett

Civil and Environmental Engineering

 

Document Type

Article

Date of this Version

2018

Citation

Poster

Comments

Copyright 2018 Ernest Tufuor & Laurence Rilett

Abstract

MOTIVATION • Collecting real-time travel data via intelligent transportation systems (ITS) rely heavily on technologies that are expensive and challenging to maintain. • Bluetooth and Wi-Fi are the most popular low-cost communication protocols that can give a good understanding of spatial and temporal nature of travel.

USEFULNESS: This will be important for two main reasons: • Allow research to be conducted in a cost effective manner on all types of facilities. • Offers the opportunity to undertake comprehensive empirical studies on link and path travel time distributions especially for arterial roads

gBT COMPONENTS AND COST • A unit of the gBT consists of a single board computer (raspberry pi), a power supply, an adjustable antenna, a global positioning system, and a wireless adaptor (Figure 1). • Estimated component cost is about $500 per location compared to about $8,000 for a vendor installed Bluetooth device.

CONCLUSION • It was shown that the gBT is viable for determining link travel times. There was an average of 4% deviation of median values with relatively wider variations compared to the GPS data. • There were no statistically significant differences between the mean travel times from both collecting systems. • The theoretical lognormal distribution best fit the travel time data from both devices.

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