Technology to Improve upon APC Data Counting that will Provide Better Correlation to Service Plan

Automatic Passenger Counting (APC) and rider Origin-Destination (OD) flow tracking are extremely important to understand the transit system utilization and rider travel patterns to minimize transit costs and efficiently run the transit system. While the market is not short of stand-alone COTS APC sensors, there are still non-trivial challenges and issues existing both for accurate passenger counting and OD flow estimation. To address these challenges IAI team proposes to develop an integrated multi-sensor passenger detection system for both APC and OD traffic flow estimation. In a nutshell, our system collects APC data from multiple sensors, fuses them to create a better estimate of people in the vehicle, and then uses a WiFi/Bluetooth sensor and surveys to infer OD flows. Our system involves of APC Estimation and OD Estimation, whose outputs will be used for data mining purposes such as bus route optimization. The proposed system will collect data from and will be demonstrated at OSU “Living Lab”. The availability of “Living Lab” will greatly reduce the risk of the proposed system and will allow us to collect data and perform experiments at unprecedented scales.