Ontology-based Multi-Agent Smart Bike Sharing System (SBSS)

A smart city can be characterized by a six-dimensional system involving people, living, governance, mobility, economy, and environment, which often function together. The Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) is a part of the mobility aspect of a smart city which necessitates the demands for seamless interoperability with information processing needs in focus. The proposed work aims to explore ontology-based approaches for smart city mobility application. The approach integrates domain-specific data from heterogeneous sources and devices for further intelligent analysis and processing in machine-readable format. In this work, we have proposed an approach for an ontology-based Smart Bike Sharing System (SBSS) architecture that addresses the challenge of unauthorized and illegal parking. A sensor agent system is proposed to be used to collect data from road transport system through embedded sensors. These embedded sensors mounted on the bikes transfer data to the nearby station during or at the end of the trip. The heterogeneous data collected from different sensors at the respective stations are transferred to the central server and integrated using the ontology. Our proposed Ontology-based Smart Bike Sharing System (SBSS) incorporates sensor data with the video data for further exploration. Applicability of proposed approach is demonstrated by the conceptualization of the use case of unauthorized and illegal parking event using Protege tool. The proposed ontology-based concepts and rules help to analyze and interpret the current scenario and predict future possibilities for improving efficiency and safety in transportation systems.