Intelligent Urban Public Transportation for Accessibility Dedicated to People with Disabilities

The traditional urban public transport system generally cannot provide an effective access service for people with disabilities, especially for disabled, wheelchair and blind (DWB) passengers. In this paper, based on advanced information & communication technologies (ICT) and green technologies (GT) concepts, a dedicated public urban transportation service access system named Mobi+ has been introduced, which facilitates the mobility of DWB passengers. The Mobi+ project consists of three subsystems: a wireless communication subsystem, which provides the data exchange and network connection services between buses and stations in the complex urban environments; the bus subsystem, which provides the DWB class detection & bus arrival notification services; and the station subsystem, which implements the urban environmental surveillance & bus auxiliary access services. The Mobi+ card that supports multi-microcontroller multi-transceiver adopts the fault-tolerant component-based hardware architecture, in which the dedicated embedded system software, i.e., operating system micro-kernel and wireless protocol, has been integrated. The dedicated Mobi+ embedded system provides the fault-tolerant resource awareness communication and scheduling mechanism to ensure the reliability in data exchange and service provision. At present, the Mobi+ system has been implemented on the buses and stations of line ‘2’ in the city of Clermont-Ferrand (France). The experiential results show that, on one hand the Mobi+ prototype system reaches the design expectations and provides an effective urban bus access service for people with disabilities; on the other hand the Mobi+ system is easily to deploy in the buses and at bus stations thanks to its low energy consumption and small form factor.