Smart school bus monitoring and notification system using RFID and GPS

Abstract

Smart education is conceived as using technology in the classrooms and school administration, yet there are other factors outside the classroom and school administration, that need to be automated such as assuring parents while sending their children to schools. One key challenge in the City of Kigali is that no trustworthy system in place, which can monitor school buses and be able to provide real-time information for children's locations while commuting to school. This remains an issue for many parents, as there is no solution, which can connect parents, their children, bus drivers, and school administration. Considering the Internet of Things (IoT) and its technology's benefits and advantages, monitoring the child’s location on their way to and from school can be realised in real-time and reduce parents’ worries besides raising the confidence level of children's safety. Within this research, the design of an IoT-based solution of smart school bus monitoring that provides SMS notification in real-time has been proposed together with its prototype development. The system allows parents and schools to track the condition and safety of children. This is done by using a combination of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) and Global Position System (GPS) technologies connected to a remote server using GSM/GPRS technologies through Arduino Uno and Arduino IDE. To accomplish the objectives of the research, further readings on the adopted technologies were made through and a three-layered IoT system architecture model was selected in the designing and development of the prototype. This resulted in a Smart School Bus (SSB) system consisted of six (6) main components and seven (7) sub-components. For the software side, the SSB is comprised of six main components too in three modules namely identification, tracking, and notification. The entire system is implemented under the N-Tier deployment style. The technical discussion highlights system requirement fulfilment, plus how the real system can be implemented as the next step after this research and the business case analysis of SSB were elaborated. The practice of diverse devices, communication rules for software features, and security instruments was a hard encounter which SSB system faces and should balance to provide its features and ensure responsive services.

KEY WORDS: RFID, GPS, SMS, notification, tracking, bus monitoring, children, IoT, Internet of things.