Ticket Validation in Public Transportation Using the Smartphone

• Autor(a) principal: João Pedro Santos Reis Leal
• Data de Publicação: 2015
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: https://hdl.handle.net/10216/83481
• topic: Engenharia electrotécnica, electrónica e informática; Electrical engineering, Electronic engineering, Information engineering

The adoption of smartphones worlwide grows everyday and it is becoming a part of our everyday life, making it easier and always connected to the world. Furthermore, a bigger integration of this technology with mundane tasks is sought after. It is then in the context of this desire that this dissertation comes to light, by finding a way to integrate the smartphone with something that is a part of a significant number of people's daily commute: public transportation. Public transportation is an important part of our society, since many depend on it everyday, in order to fulfill their daily travelling needs, like going to work, going home, going shopping and meeting friends. With that in mind, it is clear the utmost importance of further improving this infrastructure, by allowing commuters to use their smartphone to perform tickets' validation. This work provides a comparison and analysis of the use and costs of different technologies (i.e. NFC, QR Codes, Bluetooth and Location data), in the validation process of public transportation tickets. Aspects like the cost, device compatibility and ease of use are discussed and compared. After analyzing and comparing each technology, QR Codes and Location data were used to design 3 possible solutions to implement a mechanism that allows users to validate their tickets using their smartphone. With the chosen solution, an Android application and web server were implemented, which allows the validation of tickets. Other functionalities were implemented, in order to further approximate it to a production application, such as buying tickets and listing the past trips. The created application was later on tested both in laboratory environment and in a real environment, with the company responsible for bus transportation in Porto's transportation system, STCP, and its respective customers. Two questionnaires were also sent to the experiment's participants, one before and one after, in order to determine the type of transportation users that were going to participate in the experiment and also gather feedback from them, about the created system. In the end, it was possible to produce a solution that would be interesting to implement in a real scenario. The application and the experiment done proved that is possible to implement a ticket validation solution using the smartphone, with the least possible cost while maintaining the reliability needed in such a system. It was also possible to conclude that there is a high interest from the users' side in the use of a such a system. So, creating a system that is easy to use for the users and that has low distribution and maintenance costs for the operators would be beneficial for both sides.