Survey of passengers’ origin-destination in public transportation networks using WI-FI

Abstract

The knowledge of Origin-Destination (OD) locations of passengers using public transports is an important instrument to improve the service provided. In this paper, we describe a system that uses the passengers’ devices with an enabled Wi-Fi interface to track them along a transportation trip in order to infer OD information. The system does not require the cooperation of passengers other than having a device with an enabled Wi-Fi interface. The tracking system preserves the privacy of passengers, since no centrally stored raw data has any device-specific information. We deployed a prototype of the system in a bus of Porto’s public transportation network, which along several months collected 165161 passengers’ OD locations. A posterior analysis of the data gathered revealed the presence of false positives, which required the enforcement of filtering procedures in order to get values that are more reasonable for extracting relevant OD information. A comparison of bus occupancy loads of several weekdays during rush hours allowed us to find some patterns, which are an evidence of the correctness of the OD information extracted.