A smart cloud platform service for socialized travel and transportation with mobile support

Abstract

It is now clear that social networking services are evolving towards mobile web applications and continuous location sharing is also becoming a trend. In this evolution, we believe that the next step will be complete and continuous route and experience sharing. A route-based social networking cloud platform is a service in which users share their travel routes as well as experiences and stories using their mobile devices, or search for and get matched with people with similar travel and transportation habits in real-time. This work mainly focuses on the development of an end-to-end route-based social networking cloud platform service and its client-side mobile application. First, we describe the design and implementation of our real-time taxi ride-sharing service for metropolitan areas, which is a specific application of the route-sharing service. This system is composed of 1) taxi location data collection system, 2) real-time passenger coupling service and 3) a dashboard for visualization and analysis of the results. Second, we describe our location tracking mobile application that captures rich location-based information and saves it to the cloud.