Social sensing enhanced time estimation for bus service

The precise prediction of bus routes or the arrival time of buses for a traveler can enhance the quality of bus service. However, many social factors influence people's preferences for taking buses. These social factors may include heavy traffic cost, traffic congestion, poor air quality and so forth. Existing prediction techniques rarely consider social sensing when predicting the bus arrival time. Accordingly, this paper proposes a social sensing enhanced service for predicting bus routes, which integrates sensing ability and social networks to understand and measure the influence between social events and vehicle velocity. We focus on the analysis of two different attributions: PT service quality attributions PEAs and road condition attributions PRCAs. Both of them synthesize the social sensing in their evaluation of bus routes. PEA represents individual preferences and PRCA represents physical factors that significantly influence vehicle velocity. Bus relevant social events were further categorized into PEA events or PRCA events. PEAs of buses were scored according to the tendency of bus conditions reflected in social events. Furthermore, an artificial neural network prediction model is established to estimate the bus travel time. Copyright (C) 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.