A Smart Information System for Passengers of Urban Transport Based on IoT

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

In this manuscript, the authors proposed an "A Smart Information System for Passengers of Urban Transport based on IoT". The overall manuscript is well written.
• The present article provides the research community with an overview article that discusses an IoT-based smart transportation approach for Passengers.
• Although the topic is important to the body of literature, but I have some concerns about the ‘scientific contributions’ of this manuscript. Authors are suggested to present scientific contributions in bullet points with more details.
• Authors are suggested to include a comparative analysis table in the "Related Work" section to show a comparison between the proposed approach and state-of-the-art approaches
• Essentially, the technical discussion in this manuscript and the information are presented without a clear objective/foundation. Therefore, thorough proofreading/restructuring of this article is essential.
• The article reports generic works and old references without any criticism or a clear message to conclude by the readers and add some latest references.
• In this manuscript, I highly recommend authors include more detail in sections 4 and 5 with additional results to strengthen the manuscript.
• The manuscript contains many abbreviations. Therefore, authors can include a table of abbreviations at the beginning of section 1 to improve the readability of the manuscript.

Author Response

Response to Reviewer 1 Comments

Point 1: Authors are suggested to present scientific contributions in bullet points with more details.

Response to Point 1:

A specific section (5) has been included in the paper to present the scientific contributions of the research work using bullet points as it was recommended by the reviewer.

“5. Scientific contributions

This section pointed out the scientific contribution reached in the research work presented in this paper.

1. The location of buses and the estimation of the arrival time is completely based on the sensors that could be found in any of the current smartphone. In this manner, the proposed approach could be easily used in cities where no infrastructure exist to be installed in public buses to manage the real-time location of buses.
2. A low cost device has been developed to count the number of passengers traveling in a specific bus. The device has been developed using open technologies to be easily replicated by novel students in electronics or computer science.
3. The evaluation of the proposed approach has been made in a real route in Mexico. It is important to point out that current conditions in Mexican routes is chaotic in the sense that not scheduled exist in routes that permit to determine the expected time that buses need to arrive to each bus stop. The current arriving times are unpredictable.”

Point 2: Essentially, the technical discussion in this manuscript and the information are presented without a clear objective/foundation. Therefore, thorough proofreading/restructuring of this article is essential.

Response to Point 2:

We have improve the technical discussion of the paper by including the objective of paper in the Introduction section:

“In this sense, in the context of developing countries solutions are needed that use the common resources of passengers and bus drivers, such is the case of smartphones. In this manner we take advantage of the several sensors of recent smartphones for determine location and manage the remote communication with web servers. Also, cheap technological solutions are required to determine the available seats of each public bus.

In this research work, an intelligent system is presented that improves the mobility of passengers of urban transports by allowing the users to know the approximated arrival time of buses that are close to their current bus stop, and also permits monitor the availability of seats in that buses. The objective of our research is exploiting common resources for Mexican population, such as smartphones. In this sense, the solution could be easily generalized in developing countries. "

Point 3: The article reports generic works and old references without any criticism or a clear message to conclude by the readers and add some latest references.

Response to Point 3:

In order to improve the state of the art section, following 7 papers has been included:

1. Anudeep, P. and Krishna P. 2018. "Intelligent Passenger Information System Using IoT for Smart Cities", Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol. 851, pp. 67-76, 2018.
2. Agnieszka, B., 2021. The Expectations of the Residents of Szczecin in the Field of Telematics Solutions after the Launch of the Szczecin Metropolitan Railway, Information Journal, 12:339. Doi:  https://doi.org/10.3390/info12080339
3. Baire, M. at all, 201x WSN Hardware for Automotive Applications: Preliminary Results for the Case of Public Transportation. Electronics 2019, 8, 1483. https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics8121483
4. Alam, T. 2021. Cloud-Based IoT Applications and Their Roles in Smart Cities. Smart Cities 2021, 4, 1196-1219. https://doi.org/10.3390/smartcities4030064
5. Sungur, C., Babaoglu, I., and Sungur, A. 2015."Smart Bus Station-Passenger Information System," 2015 2nd International Conference on Information Science and Control Engineering, 2015, pp. 921-925, doi: 10.1109/ICISCE.2015.209.
6. Salih, T. and Younis, N. 2021. Design an Intelligent Real-Time Public Transportation Monitoring System Based on IoT. OALib. 08. 1-14. 10.4236/oalib.1107985.
7. Vakula and B. Raviteja, "Smart public transport for smart cities," 2017 International Conference on Intelligent Sustainable Systems (ICISS), 2017, pp. 805-810, doi: 10.1109/ISS1.2017.8389288.

Point 4: In this manuscript, I highly recommend authors include more detail in sections 4 and 5 with additional results to strengthen the manuscript.

Response to Point 4:

Section 4 has been completely modified to give more details about the system that implements the prediction algorithm. Also, Section 5 was modified to better explain the tests and results of application of proposed approach in a real context of a bus route in a Mexican city.

Point 5: The manuscript contains many abbreviations. Therefore, authors can include a table of abbreviations at the beginning of section 1 to improve the readability of the manuscript.

Response to Point 5: To solve this reviewer comment, we have eliminated several abbreviations and those that are complicated to eliminate were better defined or explained.

In a brief summary, the following changes have been made in the paper:

• We have improve the technical discussion of the paper by including the objective of paper in the Introduction section:
• Related work section was enriched with 10 new references
• Section 4 was completely
• Section 4 has been completely modified to give more details about the system that implements the prediction algorithm.
• Section 5 was modified to better explain the tests and results of application of proposed approach in a real context of a bus route in a Mexican city.
• We have included 7 papers in section Related work with novel works proposed by other reviewers.
• A specific section (5) has been included in the paper to present the scientific contributions of the research work using bullet points as it was recommended by the reviewer.
• The conclusion section has been extended to clarify the research directions and further work:

Reviewer 2 Report

There is a novelity in the research problem. Although the manuscript requires changes throughout all sections. Literature section needs more recent citation. Practical and Industrial implications can be added to make manuscript more practical in terms of research outcomes. Also, research limitations and future research directions need more explanation.

Author Response

Response to Reviewer 2 Comments

Point 1:  There is a novelity in the research problem. Although the manuscript requires changes throughout all sections.

Response to Point 1:

To give solution to this comment, several changes have been made in the paper:

• We have improve the technical discussion of the paper by including the objective of paper in the Introduction section:
• Related work section was enriched with 10 new references
• Section 4 was completely
• Section 4 has been completely modified to give more details about the system that implements the prediction algorithm.
• Section 5 was modified to better explain the tests and results of application of proposed approach in a real context of a bus route in a Mexican city.
• We have included 7 papers in section Related work with novel works proposed by other reviewers.
• A specific section (5) has been included in the paper to present the scientific contributions of the research work using bullet points as it was recommended by the reviewer.
• The conclusion section has been extended to clarify the research directions and further work.

Point 2: Literature section needs more recent citation.

Response to Point 2:

In order to improve the state of the art section, following papers has been included:

1. Anudeep, P. and Krishna P. 2018. "Intelligent Passenger Information System Using IoT for Smart Cities", Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol. 851, pp. 67-76, 2018.
2. Agnieszka, B., 2021. The Expectations of the Residents of Szczecin in the Field of Telematics Solutions after the Launch of the Szczecin Metropolitan Railway, Information Journal, 12:339. Doi:  https://doi.org/10.3390/info12080339
3. Baire, M. at all, 201x WSN Hardware for Automotive Applications: Preliminary Results for the Case of Public Transportation. Electronics 2019, 8, 1483. https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics8121483
4. Alam, T. 2021. Cloud-Based IoT Applications and Their Roles in Smart Cities. Smart Cities 2021, 4, 1196-1219. https://doi.org/10.3390/smartcities4030064
5. Sungur, C., Babaoglu, I., and Sungur, A. 2015."Smart Bus Station-Passenger Information System," 2015 2nd International Conference on Information Science and Control Engineering, 2015, pp. 921-925, doi: 10.1109/ICISCE.2015.209.
6. Salih, T. and Younis, N. 2021. Design an Intelligent Real-Time Public Transportation Monitoring System Based on IoT. OALib. 08. 1-14. 10.4236/oalib.1107985.
7. Vakula, D. and Raviteja, B. 2017. "Smart public transport for smart cities," 2017 International Conference on Intelligent Sustainable Systems (ICISS), 2017, pp. 805-810, doi: 10.1109/ISS1.2017.8389288.

Point 3: Practical and Industrial implications can be added to make manuscript more practical in terms of research outcomes.

Response to Point 3:

The new section of Scientific Contributions pointed out the practical implications of the proposed solution:

“5. Scientific contributions

This section pointed out the scientific contribution reached in the research work presented in this paper.

1. The location of buses and the estimation of the arrival time is completely based on the sensors that could be found in any of the current smartphone. In this manner, the proposed approach could be easily used in cities where no infrastructure exist to be installed in public buses to manage the real-time location of buses.
2. A low cost device has been developed to count the number of passengers traveling in a specific bus. The device has been developed using open technologies to be easily replicated by novel students in electronics or computer science.
3. The evaluation of the proposed approach has been made in a real route in Mexico. It is important to point out that current conditions in Mexican routes is chaotic in the sense that not scheduled exist in routes that permit to determine the expected time that buses need to arrive to each bus stop. The current arriving times are unpredictable.”

Point 4: Also, research limitations and future research directions need more explanation.

Respond to Point 4:

The conclusion section has been extended to clarify the research directions and further work:

"Limitations to the research work are related to the lack of information for public buses routes in standard formats as GTFS, which make it easy to create mobility application. Currently, the bus agencies need to design the routes and its corresponding bus stops to use the prediction algorithm.

Currently, we are exploring the possibility to improve the precision of arriving time prediction taking into account the information of all monitored buses to know the current traffic conditions that could affect a specific zone of the city. To do that, the open data of mobility in cities are being captured and placed in a unified data space. One example of the open data considered in current research is the real time location of metrobuses of Mexico City, that provide the location, each 30 seconds, for 700 public buses in the city. Also, in order to consider the real time traffic conditions in cities, the data of APIs of mobility applications are been currently used. One of the examples of this trend is the use of Here Maps API to obtain traffic data in real time for several segments of Mexican cities. Here Maps permit to obtain information about the density of traffic in a specific city area. Other developing work in the project is de combination of the proposed approach with a planning route for cities that use the public transport agencies that provide data using GTFS specification. "

In a brief summary, the following changes have been made in the paper:

• We have improve the technical discussion of the paper by including the objective of paper in the Introduction section:
• Related work section was enriched with 10 new references
• Section 4 was completely
• Section 4 has been completely modified to give more details about the system that implements the prediction algorithm.
• Section 5 was modified to better explain the tests and results of application of proposed approach in a real context of a bus route in a Mexican city.
• We have included 7 papers in section Related work with novel works proposed by other reviewers.
• A specific section (5) has been included in the paper to present the scientific contributions of the research work using bullet points as it was recommended by the reviewer.
• The conclusion section has been extended to clarify the research directions and further work.

Reviewer 3 Report

The authors presents a solution is focused on inexpensive devices that are accessible to citizens, such as mobile phones. In this research work, a smart information system for passenger of urban transport the authors presented that allows passengers to know the expected arrival times and also to know the availability of seats on the bus that is heading towards their position. The solution was evaluated with real routes and the results are promising to have a pilot in practice.

Significant: yes, the paper is a significant advance or contribution.

Supported: Mostly yes,

Referencing: some additions are necessary

Quality: The organization of the manuscript and presentation of the data and results need some improvement.

Data: Yes, but some results are necessary. 

I suggest the authors the following papers for reading:

D. Vakula and B. Raviteja, "Smart public transport for smart cities," 2017 International Conference on Intelligent Sustainable Systems (ICISS), 2017, pp. 805-810, doi: 10.1109/ISS1.2017.8389288.
Choosakun, A.; Yeom, C. Developing Evaluation Framework for Intelligent Transport System on Public Transportation in Bangkok Metropolitan Regions Using Fuzzy AHP. Infrastructures 2021, 6, 182. https://doi.org/10.3390/infrastructures6120182
C. Sungur, I. Babaoglu and A. Sungur, "Smart Bus Station-Passenger Information System," 2015 2nd International Conference on Information Science and Control Engineering, 2015, pp. 921-925, doi: 10.1109/ICISCE.2015.209.
Rodríguez González, A.B.; Vinagre Díaz, J.J.; Wilby, M.R.; Fernández Pozo, R. Data-Driven Performance Evaluation Framework for Multi-Modal Public Transport Systems. Sensors 2022, 22, 17. https://doi.org/10.3390/s22010017
P. Anudeep and N. Krishna Prakash, "Intelligent Passenger Information System Using IoT for Smart Cities", Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol. 851, pp. 67-76, 2018.
Barczak, A. The Expectations of the Residents of Szczecin in the Field of Telematics Solutions after the Launch of the Szczecin Metropolitan Railway. Information 2021, 12, 339. https://doi.org/10.3390/info12080339
S. Distefano, A. D. Giacomo and M. Mazzara, "Trustworthiness for Transportation Ecosystems: The Blockchain Vehicle Information System," in IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, vol. 22, no. 4, pp. 2013-2022, April 2021, doi: 10.1109/TITS.2021.3054996.
M. Baire, at all, WSN Hardware for Automotive Applications: Preliminary Results for the Case of Public Transportation. Electronics 2019, 8, 1483. https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics8121483
Alam, T. Cloud-Based IoT Applications and Their Roles in Smart Cities. Smart Cities 2021, 4, 1196-1219. https://doi.org/10.3390/smartcities4030064

Finally:

The paper is very interesting but necessite the little modify in the text. The paper is not clear.
I suggest to the authors need to focus on the novel contributions. I suggest to the authors to exspand the sections 3 (in particular 3c-3d) and 4. The section 5 of the results is not clear. I also recommend major reorganisation of the paper.

Author Response

Response to Reviewer 3 Comments

Point 1: Referencing: some additions are necessary

Respond to Point 1: In order to improve the state of the art section, following papers has been included:

1. Anudeep, P. and Krishna P. 2018. "Intelligent Passenger Information System Using IoT for Smart Cities", Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol. 851, pp. 67-76, 2018.
2. Agnieszka, B., 2021. The Expectations of the Residents of Szczecin in the Field of Telematics Solutions after the Launch of the Szczecin Metropolitan Railway, Information Journal, 12:339. Doi:  https://doi.org/10.3390/info12080339
3. Baire, M. at all, 201x WSN Hardware for Automotive Applications: Preliminary Results for the Case of Public Transportation. Electronics 2019, 8, 1483. https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics8121483
4. Alam, T. 2021. Cloud-Based IoT Applications and Their Roles in Smart Cities. Smart Cities 2021, 4, 1196-1219. https://doi.org/10.3390/smartcities4030064
5. Sungur, C., Babaoglu, I., and Sungur, A. 2015."Smart Bus Station-Passenger Information System," 2015 2nd International Conference on Information Science and Control Engineering, 2015, pp. 921-925, doi: 10.1109/ICISCE.2015.209.
6. Salih, T. and Younis, N. 2021. Design an Intelligent Real-Time Public Transportation Monitoring System Based on IoT. OALib. 08. 1-14. 10.4236/oalib.1107985.
7. Vakula, D. and Raviteja, B. 2017. "Smart public transport for smart cities," 2017 International Conference on Intelligent Sustainable Systems (ICISS), 2017, pp. 805-810, doi: 10.1109/ISS1.2017.8389288.

Point 2: Quality: The organization of the manuscript and presentation of the data and results need some improvement.

Response to Point 2:

To give solution to this comment, several change has been made in the paper:

• The introduction was modified to included the objectives of research
• Related work section was enriched with 10 new references
• Section 4 was completely
• Section 4 has been completely modified to give more details about the system that implements the prediction algorithm.
• Section 5 was modified to better explain the tests and results of application of proposed approach in a real context of a bus route in a Mexican city.
• A specific section (5) has been included in the paper to present the scientific contributions of the research work using bullet points as it was recommended by the reviewer.

Point 3:  Data: Yes, but some results are necessary. 

Response to Point 3: 

A specific section (5) has been included in the paper to present the results of the paper in terms of scientific contribution of the research work using bullet points as it was recommended by the reviewer.

“5. Scientific contributions

This section pointed out the scientific contribution reached in the research work presented in this paper.

1. The location of buses and the estimation of the arrival time is completely based on the sensors that could be found in any of the current smartphone. In this manner, the proposed approach could be easily used in cities where no infrastructure exist to be installed in public buses to manage the real-time location of buses.
2. A low cost device has been developed to count the number of passengers traveling in a specific bus. The device has been developed using open technologies to be easily replicated by novel students in electronics or computer science.
3. The evaluation of the proposed approach has been made in a real route in Mexico. It is important to point out that current conditions in Mexican routes is chaotic in the sense that not scheduled exist in routes that permit to determine the expected time that buses need to arrive to each bus stop. The current arriving times are unpredictable.”

Point 4: I suggest the authors the following papers for reading:

Vakula and B. Raviteja, "Smart public transport for smart cities," 2017 International Conference on Intelligent Sustainable Systems (ICISS), 2017, pp. 805-810, doi: 10.1109/ISS1.2017.8389288.
Choosakun, A.; Yeom, C. Developing Evaluation Framework for Intelligent Transport System on Public Transportation in Bangkok Metropolitan Regions Using Fuzzy AHP. Infrastructures 2021, 6, 182. https://doi.org/10.3390/infrastructures6120182
Sungur, I. Babaoglu and A. Sungur, "Smart Bus Station-Passenger Information System," 2015 2nd International Conference on Information Science and Control Engineering, 2015, pp. 921-925, doi: 10.1109/ICISCE.2015.209.
Rodríguez González, A.B.; Vinagre Díaz, J.J.; Wilby, M.R.; Fernández Pozo, R. Data-Driven Performance Evaluation Framework for Multi-Modal Public Transport Systems. Sensors 2022, 22, 17. https://doi.org/10.3390/s22010017
Anudeep and N. Krishna Prakash, "Intelligent Passenger Information System Using IoT for Smart Cities", Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol. 851, pp. 67-76, 2018.
Barczak, A. The Expectations of the Residents of Szczecin in the Field of Telematics Solutions after the Launch of the Szczecin Metropolitan Railway. Information 2021, 12, 339. https://doi.org/10.3390/info12080339
Distefano, A. D. Giacomo and M. Mazzara, "Trustworthiness for Transportation Ecosystems: The Blockchain Vehicle Information System," in IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, vol. 22, no. 4, pp. 2013-2022, April 2021, doi: 10.1109/TITS.2021.3054996.
Baire, at all, WSN Hardware for Automotive Applications: Preliminary Results for the Case of Public Transportation. Electronics 2019, 8, 1483. https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics8121483
Alam, T. Cloud-Based IoT Applications and Their Roles in Smart Cities. Smart Cities 2021, 4, 1196-1219. https://doi.org/10.3390/smartcities4030064

Response to Point 4:

Thanks a lot for the recommendation of the paper.  The following papers were included in the paper:

1. Anudeep, P. and Krishna P. 2018. "Intelligent Passenger Information System Using IoT for Smart Cities", Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol. 851, pp. 67-76, 2018.
2. Agnieszka, B., 2021. The Expectations of the Residents of Szczecin in the Field of Telematics Solutions after the Launch of the Szczecin Metropolitan Railway, Information Journal, 12:339. Doi:  https://doi.org/10.3390/info12080339
3. Baire, M. at all, 201x WSN Hardware for Automotive Applications: Preliminary Results for the Case of Public Transportation. Electronics 2019, 8, 1483. https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics8121483
4. Alam, T. 2021. Cloud-Based IoT Applications and Their Roles in Smart Cities. Smart Cities 2021, 4, 1196-1219. https://doi.org/10.3390/smartcities4030064
5. Sungur, C., Babaoglu, I., and Sungur, A. 2015."Smart Bus Station-Passenger Information System," 2015 2nd International Conference on Information Science and Control Engineering, 2015, pp. 921-925, doi: 10.1109/ICISCE.2015.209.
6. Salih, T. and Younis, N. 2021. Design an Intelligent Real-Time Public Transportation Monitoring System Based on IoT. OALib. 08. 1-14. 10.4236/oalib.1107985.
7. Vakula and B. Raviteja, "Smart public transport for smart cities," 2017 International Conference on Intelligent Sustainable Systems (ICISS), 2017, pp. 805-810, doi: 10.1109/ISS1.2017.8389288.

Some of the paper that were kindly recommended by the reviewer were not included because we consider that are a little out of the scope of our paper.

Point 5: The paper is very interesting but necessite the little modify in the text. The paper is not clear. I suggest to the authors need to focus on the novel contributions. I suggest to the authors to exspand the sections 3 (in particular 3c-3d) and 4. The section 5 of the results is not clear. I also recommend major reorganisation of the paper.

Response to Point 5:

To give solution to this comment, several changes have been made in the paper:

• We have improve the technical discussion of the paper by including the objective of paper in the Introduction section:
• Related work section was enriched with 10 new references
• Section 4 was completely
• Section 4 has been completely modified to give more details about the system that implements the prediction algorithm.
• Section 5 was modified to better explain the tests and results of application of proposed approach in a real context of a bus route in a Mexican city.
• We have included 7 papers in section Related work with novel works proposed by other reviewers.
• A specific section (5) has been included in the paper to present the scientific contributions of the research work using bullet points as it was recommended by the reviewer.
• The conclusion section has been extended to clarify the research directions and further work.

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

1. Title of the manuscript can be reframed.

2.Also, the present similarity is 24% (as per turnitin report), which is very high and above the acceptance level of 10%. It can be further reduced.

3.Authors are also adviced to have careful proof reading of the article

Author Response

Dear reviewer

Thanks a lot for the very useful comments. In order to solve the comments related to improve the English grammar of the paper, we have sent it to an expert reviewer for computer science technical papers that made a careful round of proofreading. We have made several improvements on the entire paper looking for better explaining each part of the research work.

Also, we have made improvements to reduce the similarity rate of paper in Turnitin report.

Reviewer 3 Report

The Authors responded adequately to all my comments/suggestions. That said, I would like to encourage the authors to give the paper another careful round of proofreading, to eliminate any remaining typos and grammar mistakes from the final files, starting from the abstract. The paper has been improved, and the quality of the work has improved a lot.

Author Response

Dear reviewer

Thanks a lot for the very useful comments. In order to solve the comments related to improve the English grammar of the paper, we have sent it to an expert reviewer for computer science technical papers that made a careful round of proofreading. We have made several improvements on the entire paper looking for better explaining each part of the research work.

Round 3

Reviewer 2 Report

The revised Manuscript is now well structured amd meet the expectations of the reviewer. The sections are now interlinked. Data analysis is also improved and accurate. Reviewer wish to congratulate authors for the hardwork they put to restructure and improve the work.