SubTrack: Enabling Real-Time Tracking of Subway Riding on Mobile Devices

Abstract

Real-time tracking of subway riding will provide great convenience to millions of commuters in metropolitan areas. Traditional approaches using timetables need continuous attentions from the subway riders and are limited to the poor accuracy of estimating the travel time. Recent approaches using mobile devices rely on GSM and WiFi, which are not always available underground. In this work, we present SubTrack, utilizing sensors on mobile devices to provide automatic tracking of subway riding in real time. The real-time automatic tracking covers three major aspects of a passenger: detection of entering a station, tracking the passenger's position, and estimating the arrival time of subway stops. In particular, SubTrack employs the cell ID to first detect a passenger entering a station and exploits inertial sensors on the passenger's mobile device to track the train ride. Our algorithm takes the advantages of the unique vibrations in acceleration and typical moving patterns of the train to estimate the train's velocity and the corresponding position, and further predict the arrival time in real time. Our extensive experiments in two cities in China and USA respectively demonstrate that our system can accurately track the position of subway riders, predict the arrival time and push the arrival notification in a timely manner.