Boarding Stations Inferring Based on Bus GPS and IC Data

Abstract

Understanding bus passengers’ flow patterns is an important guide for optimization of public transport system. In most cities buses have been equipped with GPS devices and Smart IC card fare devices, which leads to amount of real-time geocoded data of buses and passengers. Usually these two kinds of data could be combined for inferring passengers’ boarding stations. However, in some cases there is no straightforward relation between them, such that boarding station of passengers are unknown. In this paper, an inferring method for finding the correspondence between these two types of data is proposed. This method was validated by Qingdao data. Based on that, we analyze the spatio-temporal distribution of passengers’ flow.