Rail transportation has been considered as a main mode oftransportation in Sri Lanka
since a long time. Therefore it is important to further develop and enhance railway
transportation as an alternative method of transportation, especially considering the
traffic congestion that could be observed in city areas. With the advancement of
information technology, over the past time there have been many attempts to enhance
the quality of railway services, but despite ofthem, some major concerns for the train
passengers in Sri Lanka still remaining unsolved to date.
The main objective of this project is to propose and implement a crowdsourced real
time train tracking system based on GPS named Community Based Train Locating
System (CBTLS), for the benefit of train passengers and train transportation of Sri
Lanka, aiming to address the major concerns and enhance the railway service.
CBTLS is a community based (crowdsourced) system, therefore data is retrieved from
the train passengers, and then organized, processed and analyzed by the system, and
resulting information and predictions is given back to the train passengers.
The proposed system consists of a native Android mobile application and a Web
application. Any train passenger with a smart mobile device or a computer would be
able to access the system through internet, update the train locations, compartment
details, and view current and/or last known locations of a train, view analysis,
predictions and suggestions on train schedules. Other than static train schedules, rest of
the data required for system’s functionality is acquired from the train passengers, hence
the system is community based.
As an additional feature, a location aware alarm clock is integrated into the native
android application, for the use of passengers to indicate when their destination has
been reached.
Other than train passengers, the system consists of an administrative functionality as
well. System administrators hold responsibility to control and overview the user
accounts created by train passengers and manage static master data.
With this system, it is expected to facilitate train passengers to make better travelling
decisions by providing required information for them, hence facilitating efficient usage
ofrailway services
