As Korean society progresses and demands a better quality of life, surface transportation has emerged as a critical component. Until recently, the traditional roadways and newly constructed highways have intermingled to provide mobility to the best of their ability. However, as travel demand grows more rapidly than the new transportation systems can provide, we must find better ways to optimally utilize all the available transportation resources. Therefore the Korean Research Institute for Human Settlements (KRIHS), one of the research agencies of the Korean Ministry of Construction and Transportation, initiated the Korean Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) project in 1997 to provide comprehensive surface transportation solutions on a national scale. There are 62 transportation services defined in the Korean ITS. Out of these services, bus-related mass transit services play a vital transportation role, which account for approximately 30 percent of total surface transportation services in Korea. One of the overwhelming services demanded by the public is the availability of bus-related en-route service information, especially in the highly populated large urban cities. In our research, we focused on how to provide this mass transit en-route service information to passengers over ubiquitously available cellular phone devices while conforming to the emerging Korean ITS architecture. We chose to utilize the cellular mobile phone systems as a primary wireless information delivery medium to mass transit users is that this system has shown a dramatic penetration rate with respect to the public telecommunication service sector for the last few years in Korea.
Abstract