An Android Application for School Bus Tracking and

Student Monitoring System

Jisha R C, Mathews P Mathews, Sidharth P Kini, Vineeth Kumar, Harisankar U V, Shilpa M
Department of Computer Science and Applications
Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham
Amritapuri
India
{jisha@am.amrita.edu, mathewspmathew4@gmail.com, 141sidharth@gmail.com,
vineethkumar6469@gmail.com, harisankaruv@outlook.com, silpaprasad1996@gmail.com}

Abstract— The BUS TRACKING AND STUDENT the vehicle starts to move the parents can view the live feed in
MONITORING SYSTEM is a mobile application that ensure their application with the help of Google Maps. This helps
security to the students. The main objective of this application is keep them updated about all the issues on the way and plan
to build a vehicle monitoring system for school children. their work accordingly. Each and every updates are notified to
Nowadays, parents are perturbed about children going to school
because of the increasing number of cases of missing students. On
the parents as soon as possible. This work focuses on the
certain occasions, students need to wait a much longer time for design and implementation of a School bus tracking android
arrival of their school bus; our proposed system provides a application.
technical solution for the above scenario. The system consists of The paper is organized as: Section II explains all the works
an Internet enabled android application which will interact with related to the proposed system. In Section III, we explain the
a server. Authentication, attendance monitoring, vehicle tracking working and all the modules in this application. Section IV
are the other features provided by the system. Driver, explains the algorithms in this system and in Section V all the
Faculty/Teachers, Parents, and Administrators are the end users results are explained. In Section VI, all the future
of the application. The application uses wireless technologies like enhancements that could be brought in system are mentioned.
GPS and GPRS/GSM. With this android application parents can
watch all the movements of the bus and monitor their child’s
presence. II. RELATED WORK
Keywords—Global Positioning System (GPS); General Packet
Radio Service (GPRS); Global System for Mobile Communication The literature [2] implements a RFID method to monitor
(GSM); Student Monitoring; Android; Bus Tracking; Firebase; student attendance, using GPS tracking mechanism to track
Cloud Server; Google Maps API. the vehicle position and finally predicting the arrival time
I. INTRODUCTION using Kalmann filtering method. Here we are replacing the
hardware parts using an android application. The literature [3]
proposes and implements a low cost object tracking system
Today, parents are worried about the safety of their
using GPS and GPRS. The system allows a user to view the
children. There are a lot of issues like kidnapping children on
present and the past positions recorded of a target object on
their way home, or from home when they are sleeping or
Google Map through the internet. Basically we are using an
during a party. Recent studies show that India is in 4th place in
the number of child missing cases after United States of android application to develop a bus tracking system which is
America, United Kingdom and Germany having 96000 child cost effective. The literature [4] monitor bus traffic inside
missing cases per year [1]. Nowadays, even the bus getting spacious bus stations, and can inform administrators whether
delayed due to a small reason makes the parents bothered the bus is arriving on time, early or late based on RFID
about it. But today’s technology can provide a much better technology. This information is then displayed on the different
solution to ensure the children’s safety. To track and monitor wireless displays inside and outside the bus station. Paper [5]
their children, the proposed system provides an Android based deals with Expectation Maximization algorithm to resolve
bus tracking system. All the registered users can view/collect traffic anomalies and it uses Hadoop map reduce method.
and exchange data inside the android application. Inside the [6]Proposes an application which uses GPS and GPRS
vehicle there would be a teacher/faculty who would be in technologies to predict the real – time location of the bus and
charge of the vehicle and he/she would also be in charge of the arrival time of bus. The Literature [7, 8, 9, 10] talks about
taking the student’s attendance. As soon as it is taken, parents vehicle tracking and various arrival time prediction methods.
would be notified if their child has boarded the bus or not. The The proposed system can also be extended to get this
GPS in the driver’s mobile is used to track the vehicle. Once information in a cost effective manner.

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 2018 IEEE International Conference on Computational Intelligence and Computing Research

III. PROPOSED WORK B. Client / User Layer

This layer mainly consists of all the users of this
The proposed system is an Android application which helps application. They interact with the system to collect and give
parents keep track of their ward(s). This application is handled information. The various functions of all the users are as stated
by four categories of users: Parents, Faculty/Teacher, Driver, below.
and Admin. Admin handles all the users and all emergency
situations [about main events that are happening or that would x Faculty: He/she is the one who is in charge of the
happen in a particular day]. Faculty is in charge of all children whole children in the vehicle and their safety. They
in a vehicle and makes sure that they have boarded the bus or are given the authority to mark the attendance of the
not. Driver is in charge of notifying the start and end of children in the to and fro journey and make sure that
journey. Only after his/her confirmation shall the bus’s the children board the bus in time safely. Once the
attendance is taken, it is sent to the cloud server and
location starts transmitting to parents. Parents can watch the will be stored there. As soon as the attendance is
live location of the bus and ensure that their child have updated, parents would be notified and they could just
boarded or not by just reviewing. Each child is identified by check it.
his/her own unique ID.
x Driver: He would notify the vehicle is starting to
. move from the school. Once he notifies, the location
Application Layer starts transmitting from his device. It is sent to
Firebase and stored there for later use. For every
Firebase Cloud server Location Map
update in location, the parent can view each and every
movement of the bus.
x Parent: He/she can constantly watch over his child on
Client Side / User Layer his/her way to school and back home. They can watch
all the small moves that the bus makes and can check
Parent Driver Faculty Admin
if their child has boarded the bus or has gone missing
or did he/she bunked the bus. Parents would be
notified if there is a holiday, atleast a night prior to it
Communication Layer and even special events or some issue on the way.
GPS GPRS x Administrator: He/she is the responsible for the
management of all users, vehicles and routes in the
system. Admin is also given the authority to inform
Fig 1.Architecture Diagram parents about all events even if it is a small one.
A. Communication Layer
C. Application Layer
This Layer is used to establish a connection between the User
This layer contains all the important technologies that are
layer and the Application layer. Various technologies like GPS
working mainly in the back end. It consists of the following
and GPRS is used in this layer.
components and its functions are explained along with it.

x GPS: Global Positioning System is used to locate the x Firebase: It is platform for the development of web
device. Tracking is possible even without the GPS, we and mobile applications provided by Google which is
could use the distance of the device from nearest free for a small number of users using the same access
tower and some other features. But it won’t be point. In Firebase, GPS location is saved in Real time
accurate, the obstacles in the way makes it hard. If we database which will be ready for updating in the other
are using GPS, then we would be able to pinpoint the end. It only takes a few milliseconds to save and make
device even through some obstacles, but if there are a the same changes where it is being called upon. It is
lot of obstructions or if the device is indoor it might be the best platform that could be used for tracking using
tough to get the location. GPS
x GPRS: General Packet Radio Service is a wireless x Cloud Server: A server is used to store the details of
communication service based on packets and enables the users and all the information about the buses,
continuous connection to Internet to the mobile routes and attendance of the children. Historical data
device. It is using this connection; we are sending data are also saved in the server. It is where all the users
from device to cloud server and Firebase and taking interact and collect all the information that they need.
data from them. A stable GPRS connection is needed
for the live tracking of the bus. x Location Map: It is shown in parent’s device using
Google Maps API. Once a change in location data is
found in the Firebase, the same will be updated in the
Map.
 2018 IEEE International Conference on Computational Intelligence and Computing Research

IV. ALGORITHM Tracking Bus in the Parent Module

This section contains the various algorithms in different
user’s device/ server. Here we are identifying vehicles position Input: Login Credentials of the Parent.
using Google Map API. The code will capture vehicles Output: Live location of the vehicle.
position and send it to Firebase cloud database. The driver is 1. Login to Parent Portal.
responsible to enable this module using his login credentials. 2. Click on “Track bus” to see the current location of the
The screenshot of the module has given in Fig 4 and in Fig 5. bus.
3. Fetch data from Firebase for every changes that occurs.
A. Starting Journey in the Driver Module 4. Plot the data in Google Map.
Input: Login Credentials of the Driver.
The screenshot for the vehicle tracking module has been
Output: Live GPS location of the vehicle captured in the following figure (Fig 3). Sometimes bus route
1. Login to Driver Portal may change because of traffic, religious celebrations or
2. Click on “Start Journey” once it is time to leave the protests etc. and thereby delay comes in travelling. Based on
school. the delay in the travelling, the parents can know the position
3. Read Latitude and Latitude of the device from GPS. of the vehicle is the one of the important attractions of this
4. Google Map loads showing the vehicle’s location. module. We can enhance the features just by predicting the
5. Start sending the location data to Firebase until the arrival time of the vehicle in each intermediate stops [2].
destination is reached.

The attendance module will capture the attendance of the

students in the bus with time and send to the cloud server for
further processing. Faculty present in the bus is responsible for
this. An android interface is used to do the attendance entry.
The screenshot is shown in the following figure (Fig 2).

Fig 3.Track Bus

Viewing Attendance in the Parent Module

Taking Attendance in the Faculty Module Input: Login Credentials of the Parent.
Output: Status of their child.
Input: Login Credentials of the Faculty.
Output: Attendance list of the children in the vehicle.
1. Login to Parent Portal.
1. Login to Faculty Portal.
2. Click on “View Attendance” to see if the child has
2. Click on “Take Attendance” once the vehicle leaves the
boarded the bus.
school.
3. Fetch data from server.
3. Mark the set of students that are present in the bus.
4. View/Show the attendance status.
4. The final data is sent to the cloud server.
The above pseudo code will allow the parents to view the
The following set of pseudo code is used to track the bus by
attendance of their ward and hence they can ensure the
parents. Whenever a route change or delay in reaching the
security. The data will be retrieved from the firebase cloud
intermediate stops has been recorded and stored in the firebase server and populate the data to the android application.
cloud server and plot the data in Google Map.
 2018 IEEE International Conference on Computational Intelligence and Computing Research

V. RESULTS and which can be viewed by the parents , screenshot of same

The system was developed using android studio, the is placed here (Fig 4).
webserver is xampp. The database used is phpmyadmin and Vehicle Tracking and Monitoring: The driver notifies the start
firebase. The application is basically installed in android tabs of the vehicle and from that moment, the vehicle’s location
and phones. The different GUI s in the application and their could be seen by the parents. Retrieving the position of the
use has shown below. It contains different modules for vehicle using Google map API. Parents could keep of their
administrator, faculty, parents and drivers. Screenshot of children using this application. As soon as the vehicle starts
parents view has been shown below (fig 4). Application moving, parent would be notified about that and they could
contains attendance monitoring and vehicle tracking and just watch each and every movement of the vehicle. Just as the
monitoring features (Fig 2 and Fig 3). vehicle is leaving the school, the child’s presence would also
be notified.
VI. Conclusion

We developed an Android application for school bus

tracking and to monitor children. It was with the use of
wireless technologies like GPS and GPRS and some good
platforms like Firebase. With the help of this application
parents need not worry about their child. Its implementation is
done in a very cost effective way as it only needs mobile’s
GPS and Internet connection. This might not be 100%
efficient as it depends on the speed of the mobile and the
connectivity of the GPS. This would be a great relief for the
parents who are really worried about their child’s safety. Some
of the future enhancements that could be brought in this
system are Fingerprint Scanner, RFID Tags [2], ETA
(Estimated time of Arrival) [2], Chat box for parents to
interact with faculties etc,.

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