Creating a Traveller Digital Twin: Bluetooth Low Energy for Fine-Granular Traveller Localisation

Abstract

Using a traveller digital twin to collect real-time information can support future public transport features, such as personalised routing, automatic travel experience monitoring and real-time demand-based disruption management. For these features, reliable real-time information about travellers is crucial. This work describes how a Bluetooth Low Energy setup can be employed to localise travellers during their journey and represent their status in a traveller digital twin. We provide an overview of existing BLE applications in the transport sector and present our BLE beacon setup. We perform a statistical analysis of the BLE beacons’ signal performance in a test environment and present the results. We evaluate the performance of the BLE based traveller digital twin using real data acquired during a measurement campaign in the mentioned test environment.