CARE: An IoT based system for passenger service and comfort in railways

Abstract

Railways constitute one of the most extensively used mode of transportation in the world. The global passenger traffic is expected to grow steadily in the coming years. This growth in traffic thus calls for a corresponding increase in the comfort and service provided to passengers on-board a railway train. In this paper, we propose CARE, an Internet of Things (IoT) based system for catering to passenger services and requests in railway trains. The system leverages the use of Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) technology to track the location of crew members (mobile resources) within a train. An On-line Proximity-Aware Mobile (OPAM) multi-objective resource allocation algorithm has been devised which on the basis of service arrival time, location information and workload factor, allocates crew members to the requests from the passengers. We have experimentally evaluated the performance of our approach and found it to be far better than the conventionally used purely centralized method. For inter train and station scenarios, a mobile agent based solution has been proposed to locate the resources not available within a train.