Mobile GIS Application for Khartoum Public Transportation Network Mohammed Mahmoud Ibrahim (1) -Department of GIS and Remote Sensing, Faculty of Geoinformatics -Future University of Sudan -Khartoum, Sudan-mohammed.aau@gmail.com Karam Abdulmahmoud Ibrahim (2) Department of Information Technology, Faculty of Computer Science and Information Technology-Karary University-Khartoum, Sudankaramibrahim444@gmail.com Eltaib Saeed Mohamed Ganawa (3) Department of GIS and Cartography, Faculty of Geographical and Environmental Sciences -University of Khartoum- Khartoum, Sudan-ganawagis@gmail.com Abstract There are more than 6.8 billion mobile cellular subscribers (2013), wireless communication and mobile computing have gained acceptance worldwide with speed that has surpassed many other technological innovations. Mobile GIS emerged in the mid-1990s to meet the needs of field work such as surveying, utility maintenance and navigation. This paper aims to develop a mobile GIS navigation application for Khartoum public transportation based on ArcGIS Network Analyst to create the public transportation network dataset, and ArcGIS Server as web GIS server for dissemination and sharing the network dataset over the internet. The Adobe Flash Builder integrated development environment (IDE) using ArcGIS API for Flex has been used to develop a mobile GIS application with interactive user interface. The developed application enable users to view the transportation lines, get the current position of smartphone and generate the route of navigation through public transportation lines. 84
Keywords GIS; Mobile GIS; Transportation Network; ArcGIS Network Analyst; Web GIS Service; Adobe Flash Builder; ArcGIS API for Flex; Khartoum Public Transportation. I. INTRODUCTION Movement of the people from one location to another requires information about the destination address and the route of movement, and the most people depend on public transportation in movement, it will be very useful if there are a mobile application provides directional information about the movement and navigation based on public transportation network. Network analysis in GIS is often used to find solutions to transportation problems. Networks are the interconnected features that are used for transportation including highways, railways, city streets, rivers and utility systems. Mobile or handheld GIS is simply GIS software that runs on handheld devices such as smartphones and tablet PCs. With the rapid progress of the hardware industry, wireless networks, and the popularity of handheld devices, mobile GIS software might become the dominant category of GIS software in the near future. The development of mobile GIS application by integrating Adobe Flash Builder development environment, ArcGIS API for Flex to build a mobile GIS application with interactive user interface and ArcGIS Server web server to disseminate and share the network dataset over the internet. This application aims to provide navigation service for smartphone users based on public transportation network. 85
II. BACKGROUND A. Network Analysis Networks are all around us. Roads, railways, cables, pipelines, streams and even glaciers are phenomena that frequently need to be represented and analyzed as a network (2005 Nigel Trodd). Networks are used to move people, transport goods, communicate information and control the flow of matter and energy. It is not surprising then that techniques have been developed to analyze these most geographical phenomena. Network analysis enables us to solve problems, such as finding the most efficient travel route, generating travel directions, finding the closest facility, defining service areas based on travel time. The Network Analyst extension for ArcMap solves problems of any interconnected set of lines these lines may represent traffic network on streets. It can find the shortest route and closest facility according to user's search. B. Mobile GIS Mobile GIS is the technology to provide geographic information services in mobile computing environment the term mobile GIS as an integrated software/hardware framework for the access of geospatial data and services through mobile devices via wireless or wire line networks. Mobile systems allow GIS tools to be accessed wirelessly and utilized in field situations, away from the desktop, for a sustained period of time. The Mobile GIS applications allow wide use and sharing GIS technologies with the public, we can divide Mobile GIS application areas into two categories: Field-Based GIS (FBGIS) and Location-Based Services LBS). The applications of network analysis in mobile GIS can be classified into generic and engineering. Generic 86
applications are mainly navigation and its associated family of related applications, while engineering applications are related to public utilities network applications. In mobile GIS, the navigation applications are based on three fundamentals, first the transportation network, second the current location of the user and the desired destination, third the algorithms required to solve the problems and represent the optimal path. The public utilities applications for mobile GIS have special objectives and usage. They are specific to certain users according to its authority and responsibilities towards the network operations. The architecture of mobile GIS is very similar to the Internet GIS. It follows the concepts of client/server architecture in traditional Internet GIS applications. The client-side mobile GIS components are the end-user machines which can display maps or provide analytical results of GIS operations. The server-side components provide comprehensive geospatial data and GIS operations based on the requested from the client-side components. Between the client and server, there are various types of communication networks (such as wired cable connections or wireless communications) to facilitate the exchanges of geodata and services between clients and servers. The following figure illustrates the six basic components of mobile GIS: i. Positioning systems. ii. Mobile GIS receivers. iii. Mobile GIS software. iv. Data synchronization/wireless communication component. v. Geospatial data. vi. GIS content servers. 87
Figure 1: Mobile GIS components and architecture. C. Mobile Application Development Mobile application development is differentiated from desktop and Web application development primarily by the hardware and other system constraints of the device that the application will run on. Those constraints vary slightly from platform to platform. Every mobile operating system provides their own set of tools and environments to develop apps that will run on them. Application made for one operating system cannot run on any other platform as they are entirely different. Developers tend to cover all major mobile operating systems in order to increase reachability among their users. Thus it becomes a tedious task to develop an application program that may run on all major OS platforms, keeping its look, feel, and functionality identical on all platforms. For this work, a developer needs to understand all platforms and should have good understanding of major development tools for different OS. Users will use many different devices to access Apps. Some will access apps through a corporate network only, while other apps are consumer-focused. Once you ve determined the audience and platforms, you must figure out what kind of software will serve the needs of those audiences, potentially with platform-specific features. Mobile apps can be generally broken down into native, hybrid and web apps. Going the native route allows you to use all of the capabilities of a device and operating system, with a minimum of performance overhead on a given platform. However, building a web app allows your code to be ported 88
across platforms, which can dramatically reduce development time and cost, Hybrid apps combine the best of both worlds, using a common code base to deploy native-like apps to a wide range of platforms. III. METHODOLOGY A. Study Area The study area is greater Khartoum city which consist of Khartoum and Jabal Awlia localities, It is located at the confluence of the White Nile and the Blue Nile, between longitudes (32⁰ 27' 18" 32⁰ 40' 35" East) and latitudes (15⁰ 11' 58" 15⁰ 38' 26" North), Figure 2 shows the boundaries of the study area. It is one corner of the "triangular capital", the other two corners are the cities of Omdurman and Bahri. The total area 730.3 KM² and the 2008 urban Khartoum population was 2,042,352 and the metro area was 5,270,000. The commercial and services facilities of Khartoum state are concentrated in Khartoum city, and also Khartoum city could be considered as the administrative center of Khartoum and Sudan as well, because most of local and federal ministries lies within it s boundary. The public transportation network is mainly connected with five main stations KerKer, Khartoum Stadium, Sharwani, AL-Souq AL-Shaabi and AL- Souq AL-Markazi. These stations are located in the main markets of the city in addition to neighboring the administrative, commercial, educational and healthy facilities that lead to crowded city with high demand for public transportation which in turn lead to overlapped public transportation lines. B. Data The data used in application consists of OpenStreetMap (OSM) is an open source mapping project which is 89
collaboratively edited by users all over the world. The open source nature of the project means that anyone can download spatial data from it for free. OpenStreetMap services has been used as background map for visualization. Khartoum Map It contains Study Area, Public Transport Lines and Points of Interest (POI) Layers, Khartoum Map has been published as Map Service (MapServer) by using ArcGIS Server. Public Transport Network Dataset, The Khartoum Public Transport Network dataset which consists of lines representing public transport route and attributes. The public transport network datasets have been published as network analysis service (NAServer). Smartphone GPS Position since almost every smartphone comes with a built-in GPS receiver used to give exact location and time information. Smartphone GPS data has been used to specify location of the user. Figure 2: Study Area C. Method The Mobile GIS Navigation Application has been developed through a sequence of phases, which consist of Creating Map Document and Cartography, publishing the map document to be hosted on GIS Server, Developing the Mobile GIS Application and Deploying the application to mobile devices. Figure 3 illustrates the sequence of development phases and architecture of the application. 90
Figure 4: Public Transportation Map Figure 3: Methodology. IV. RESULTS AND DESCUSION The Khartoum Public Transportation Mobile Application is based on Web Mapping Services (WMS), a Map and Network dataset has designed in ArcGIS Desktop, and then those maps have been published online to ArcGIS Server as map services and network analysis service. Figure 4 shows Khartoum Public Transportation Map which consists of Khartoum Public Transportation Lines and the route network analysis layer. The Mobile GIS Based Navigation Application has been developed to allow the user to interact with ArcGIS Server Map Service. The application provides simple interface for navigation with simple operations such as Zooming Tools, Basic query operation, Geolocation and route generation using Khartoum Public Transportation Network dataset. The navigation on the network require that at least two points are specified, beginning point and destination point, called stops, often the beginning stop is a location of the smartphone 91
user, When the Application is started The Location of smartphone user is specified, this process require the GPS of smartphone is activated. Figure 5 shows the main Graphical User Interface (GUI) of Khartoum Public Transportation Mobile Application, the main components of interface are Zoom In, Zoom Out, Search, GPS Location Service, Get Route and Route Direction List. Figure 5: The main GUI of application In most cases the destination point may be one of the POIs or near to POIs, The Application allows the user to search for POIs within Khartoum city through the Search Panel. Figure 6 shows the search panel which consists of TextInput to allow users to enter search text and DataGrid (Table) to show list of the search results (Results Table), every POIs name match the search text appear in the Map as red points. Sometimes the search text matches more than one POIs, to show only the desired POI in the Map, the user must click on the name of the POI in the Result Table, Figure 4.8 demonstrate the action of the click event on the Result Table, the desired POI appears in the Map as green point. To get route and direction the user must add at least two stops, the beginning stop and destination stops can be added through touch on a desired positions in the map. The route and directional information can be generated through clicking on 92
the get route button. Immediately the route is displayed on the map as blue line and the directional information can be displayed through clicking on the get Direction button. Figure 7 shows the generated route and directional information of the route. Figure 6: Search for POIs Panel. Figure 7: The route and directional information V. CONCLUSION Khartoum is a one of the most crowded city in Sudan, and there are a very high number of resident in Khartoum city, most of the resident depend on public transportation to move, and most of them making an effort of inquiries to know some information about the route to arrive at the destination address, due to the high number of public transportation lines and overlapping between it. Network Analysis Extension in ArcGIS Desktop is used to solve problems of interconnected lines, and the ArcGIS Server is used to host Maps and GIS resources as web mapping services, this service can be consumed by Web and Mobile applications, the integrated development environment Adobe Flash Builder is used to develop Mobile application for different platforms, the application programming interface ArcGIS API for Flex is used to develop GIS based 93
Applications that consume web map services which hosted on top of ArcGIS Server. In this research paper, we have developed a Mobile GIS based Application for android platform, the developed Mobile GIS application provides navigation service based on public transportation network, with the following capabilities Exploring Khartoum City through the Maps, Locating the position of smartphone user, Searching for different facilities in Khartoum City, Finding the route of movement based on public transportation network and Displaying detailed directional information to move on public transportation network. 94
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