Abstract:

The recent emergence of Internet of Things (IoT) has enabled us to consider the contextual factors that can have an impact on students’ life and consequently on their education and learning outcomes. Children around the world spend an inordinate amount of time traveling to and from school. Many children in developing a developed nations use school busses which may or may not be regulated by the government. What happens inside a school bus including the environment, the amount of time took etc. is generally not known. This is especially true when the school buses are operated by private operators. A part of smart education is to bring more transparency into what goes on in a school bus and to take appropriate regulatory and policy actions based on such data. For example, there should be constraints on the maximum amount of time a child spends on a school bus as well as the environmental, safety and traceability aspects of where a child is. This paper proposes a system which instruments each school bus with sensors that collect information about the conditions in a bus and transmit is in real time to a server using the telecom infrastructure. This information about each bus is then analyzed and reports are generated for the school as well as for the Ministry of Education on various aspects like environment, time, safety etc. The proposed system directly interacts with the bus using the OBD/CAN interface. OBD/CAN is a standard that allows an external system to collect information like speed, acceleration, and various aspects of vehicle’s state. The system can be split into three main components/subsystems which are: real-time vehicle status supervision using OBDII module, real-time location tracking using GPS, and bus attendance and usage monitoring using RFID. The OBDII module is responsible for extracting specific and accurate information from the vehicle like: fuel consumption, current vehicle speed, rpm, engine temperature, and seat belt state. GPS module, on the other hand, is used for pinpointing the current location of the bus on a map, tracing its daily routes taken, and estimating its round trip to school time. Finally, an RFID module is installed on each school bus’s door to monitor city wide attendance and usage of school transportation system. For this to happen, each student is assigned a RFID card that triggers the reader once someone rides or leaves the bus. Technically, the system uses a collection of heterogeneous devices and technologies. The Arduino microcontroller is chosen to communicate captured data from OBDII module locally inside the bus. Subsequently the microcontroller sends collected data via MQTT protocol to a remotely allocated server using a GSM/GPRS module. Then, the data is retrieved and processed by the server using a NodeJS Web Application. By filtering and analyzing the data on the server a host of information like the environmental condition in the bus (temperature, humidity etc.), fuel consumption, the most congested paths and traffic bottlenecks, and the degree of conformity of bus drivers to the policies and the law. Data is instantly communicated back to subscribed users based on their requirements and interests. In case of vehicle failure or emergency, notifications are communicated back to the authorities of concern or bus drivers. Finally, periodic statistics and charts, displayed on dashboards, are generated to enhance the decision making policies and quality of smart education service.

Keywords:

School bus, educational management, IoT.