Smart Bus: A Tracking System for School Buses
Majd Ghareeb, Athar Ghamlous, Hawraa Hamdan, Ali Bazzi and Samih Abdul-Nabi
Computer and Communication Engineering
International University of Beirut
146404 Mazraa, Beirut, Lebanon
majd.ghareeb@b-iu.edu.lb
Abstract— An increased concern for parents is the safety of
their children on the way back home from school and the timing
of their arrival. Waiting school buses in the morning and then in
the afternoon to return kids back is a time wasting daily mission
on parents, especially with the increasing traffic jams at these
hours. In this paper we present a mobile and web application
that is designed to address this issue. The system will help
parents, the school and the bus to communicate automatically
and easily via the application in order to detect kids’ arrival time.
The bus application side will notify parents few minutes before
its approaching to their home. Furthermore, the system will
allow parents to inform the school and hence the bus application
side about the absence of their kid. The system has been
efficiently and dynamically designed and implemented so it can
be hosted and used by any school administration without the
need to any major modifications.
Keywords—tracking systems, Mobile applications, Web
applications, smart cities.
I. INTRODUCTION
With the increase awareness of education and knowledge
importance, Lebanese citizens became more and more
selective in the quality of schools they are choosing for their
children. This fact may lead parents to choose a good school
even if it is far from their residence. On the other hand, and
even if the school was close enough, the traffic congestions
would make the on-feet journey of the kid to the school very
risky. Driving children to school is a solution. However, it
consumes a lot of time and effort each day in the morning and
the afternoon. Hence, school buses are commonly used by all
schools to take the student from and to his home.
Nevertheless, and again with the huge traffic congestions in
Lebanon, waiting the bus each day in the morning and in the
afternoon to arrive is an exhausting and a time-wasting
mission.
To solve the above mentioned issue, many tracking systems
do exist in the market such as the kids GPS watch [1]. It is a
wearable mobile GPS where parents can track their kids
location. Each kid will have his own tracker that usually costs
more than 100 American Dollars. Another solution is to give a
mobile phone to the kid, so a tracking application can be used
to detect the location. However, holding a mobile phone in
schools is usually prevented for the students without
mentioning the bad side effects of this step.
978-1-5090-6011-5/17/$31.00 ©2017 IEEE
The objective of this project is to facilitate this task on
parents and save their time by automatically notifying them
few minutes before the arrival of their kid, so they can go out
to receive him from the bus. This is also applied in the
morning tour of the bus to inform parents that the bus is
approaching and their kid should go out to take the bus to
school. This system can be used by any Lebanese school to
increase the safety measures for its students and to relieve
parents from the responsibility of waiting school buses each
day.
II. SMART BUS SYSTEM OVERVIEW
Fig1 represents a general overview of the project objective.
This objective will be met via an android application [2,3] that
will be running on two sides, school bus and parent side. The
application main aim is to detect the current location of the
bus using the GPS and to automatically notify the parents few
minutes before arriving to the kid’s house. Besides, it will
alarm the driver to drop down the kid in the given address. In
their turn, parent can use the application to detect the current
bus location, receive the notification of his kids arrival time
and set any of his kids as absent if it is the case. This
application is supported by a website used by the school to set
the buses and link each kid’s address with the corresponding
bus.
Up to our knowledge, smart bus is the first system that will
be monitored by the school and the driver and not by the kid. It
will insure that parents are aware of their kid’s location without
the need to call the bus driver while driving or to get worry
because of occasional delay. This will be done without the
need for the child to hold a personal mobile phone. An
automatic notification SMS will be sent to the parents via the
application to inform them about the time of their kid’s arrival
so they can get ready to receive them. Moreover, parents will
be able to enter to the system via their mobile application or
their website page to set their kids as absent if it is the case.
This last mission will relieve the school from the task of calling
parents to check their kid’s absence and the bus driver from
passing by houses with no reason. The application contains a
map that will appear in two different shapes for the parent or
the bus driver. From the parent side, they can query the
application at any time to detect the current location of the
school bus that holds their kid. On the other hand, bus driver
will see a map marked by the houses that he should pass over
to drive the kids in his tour. Absent student’s house will not
appear in the map and already arrived student’s houses will be
marked as gray.
Fig. 1: Smart Bus Architecture Design
III. SYSTEM SPECIFICATIONS AND REQUIREMENTS
. IV. SYSTEM DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION
As shown in Fig2, our smart bus system consists mainly in
three roles that are the school administration, the application
from the bus side, and the parent application. These three
actors have the following specifications and requirements
from the system:
Fig. 2: Use case diagram of Smart Bus System
- School side application:
• Add or update information about buses and students.
• Assign students to a corresponding bus identified by
their addresses and parent phone numbers.
• Check absences records of each student.
- Parents side application:
• The ability of setting their kids absent from the
android application or from the website.
• The ability of viewing the location of the school bus
at any given instant of time.
• The ability of seeing the absence history of their kids.
- Bus side application:
• The ability of updating its current location each 5
minutes.
• The ability of viewing the homes of the students that
are registered in this bus on the map: red houses
represent kids that are absent and green houses
represents kids that are attending school today.
• Comparing the distance between the bus and each
home, when this distance is less or equal to 3 Km
the application will send a message to inform the
parents that their kid/s will arrive home in 5
minutes.
In this section we introduce the skeleton of the android
application [2] and the website [3,4] of our system, starting
from the home pages, going down through login page to
specify which one of the actors is trying to log on the system
(android application: school bus or parent and website: school
or parent). Each user has his own page and his own privilege
on the system.
Fig. 3: Map shown when the driver signs in
The school has the ability of adding and well organizing
buses and kids using the website and also giving parents
secure accounts to access the android application.
 Parents are able to use both application and website, as
from the web side parents are able to set any of their kids
absent to inform the school and the driver. In addition, they
have the ability of seeing the absence history of their children.
While from the application side parents can also set their kids
absent and they can also track their kids’ journey back home.
Fig. 4: Sitemap Diagram for Android Application
In the school bus the android application will be only used
to do many tasks automatically: First after logging in, a map
will appear containing all the homes corresponding to the
signed in school bus (homes which belong to kids that are
attending school today will have a green color but others that
belong to absent kids for today will have a red color as
depicted in Fig3), a button will be located in the corner of the
map when the school bus driver decides to depart from school
to drop down the students home he should press this button
(Departure button). After pressing this buttons the application
will start two tasks: the application will update the current
location of the school bus each 5 minutes. It will compute the
distance between the currents school bus location and all the
homes where no students are set absent and where the kid/s
didn’t arrive home yet and when this distance achieves 3 Km
or less than 3 Km a SMS will be sent to the parents to inform
them that after approximately 5 minutes your kid/s will arrive
home.
After all the kids arrive home, the application
automatically will clear all the absence’s records that are set to
one, also will clear all the arrived flags and finally the
computation of distance and the update of current location will
stop until the next day (repressing the departure button). Fig4
and Fig5 show the sitemap diagram of the android and the
website applications respectively.
Fig. 5: Sitemap Diagram for website
V. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION
Enhancing education system could be done not only by
targeting the process of education itself, but also by providing
the most possible comfort for student and parents to increase
their interest in school. The idea of this project was to target
this issue, in which a tracking system for the school bus was
designed and developed using a software application (android
and web). This system provides a mean for the parents to track
their kids while they are in the bus and notifies them before
the arrival of the bus to their houses location. The system is
totally managed by the school which puts less cost and more
information security. It allows the school to know about the
absence of a student and hence the driver of the bus can avoid
passing by his place if this will help him to avoid road
congestion. A possible improvement that could be added to
the application is to use notifications rather than sending SMS
since it is cheaper. Adding an alarm to the application from
the bus side to remind driver when he gets beside students
home is another good idea to be added. Moreover, adding
secondary address such as grandparent or another relative
address to the database and enable parents to inform school
via our system to drop the kid by that secondary address is
also an important enhancement to the functionality of the
application.
REFERENCES
[1] Briley Kenney. The best GPS Tracking Watches for Kids:
Updated for 2016. Retrieved from http://smartwatches.org/
[2] Paul Deitel, “Android for Programmers: An App-Driven
Approach” , Deitel Developer, 2012.
[3] Hector Garca-Molina, Jeffery D. Ullman and Jennifer Widom, “
Database Systems: The Complete Book, 2nd Edition”, Peasrson,
June 2008.
[4] Robin Nixon, “Learning PHP, MySQL, JavaScript, and “, 2012.
[5] Wei-Meng Lee, “Beginning Android 4 Application Development
2nd edition”, Wiley, March, 2012.