Welcome to TTS - the UCF Transit Tracking System

Friday, April 29, 2010 | 1:51 am

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This project began with a need. Currently the second largest university in the nation, the University of Central Florida boasts an enormous community, full of students, staff, and faculty. Each day, the campus is plagued with heavy traffic, and no available parking. This problem continues to increase each year, parallel to the overall population. While the school makes efforts to help alleviate this issue by building more parking garages and expanding parking lots, it is simply not enough to cure it completely. Another resource available to help this cause is the university's complementary shuttle transit system. This service, available at no charge, runs daily from roughly 6:30 in the morning to 10:00 at night. Not only is this service provided for transit on campus, but it includes several routes off campus to many of the major local housing developments. The unfortunate part about this free service is the fact that its convenience is not realized by a good majority of the student population. Students lack trust in the reliability of the system, and quickly make the choice to use their own personal vehicle for their commute. Thus the problem arises, how to raise awareness and draw popularity to the shuttle system. This problem provided the foundation for which the Transit Tracking System was created.

The TTS project will incorporate a medley of hardware and software to track the university's shuttles, and to provide the user population with a graphical interface of each bus location in real-time. The overall design selected for this project will provide a fast and efficient way for accomplishing its goal. Each bus will have its own tracking device, where GPS and accelerometer information will be collected, packaged, and transmitted through the RF modem. At the radio tower on campus, the data collection and processing server will gather this data, unpack it, and store it into the database. Each time a new package is received from the bus, a new entry will be inserted into the database. The web application will connect to the database, to retrieve live data and update the map accordingly. The client will be able to access the web application through their web browser on their workstation. Additionally, administrative users will have access to a password-protected interface, where they will have the ability to modify the data. These administrative functions include adding and removing routes, modifying route paths, adding and removing bus stops, adding and removing administrators, and setting the active status of the routes, buses, and bus stops.

The final product developed in this project should have a very positive impact on the UCF community. This tracking system should substantially increase the reliability of the transit system, drawing more students towards riding the bus and not using their own personal vehicles. This snowballing effect should eventually help to improve the heavy traffic and parking situation that exists at the university. Should the project be completed ahead of schedule successfully, an extension will be made to develop mobile applications for the tracking system. This effort will guarantee a further increase in the user population and satisfaction, because of the high popularity in smartphones today. Said application will provide users with a similar graphical interface, displaying the real-time positions of the buses. Having this convenience on-the-go should entice many more individuals to utilize the complementary shuttle transit system.