One Page Summary

Ypsonas is a continuously developing and rapidly expanded suburb of Limassol, located west of the city. Lately, the suburb has seen remarkable progress in many areas such as childcare, schools, shops, services and community facilities. This progress, in combination with the quick and direct access to the highway, classifies Ypsonas as one of the most attractive areas for residence in Cyprus. Consequently, the population of Ypsonas is growing rapidly as more and more people, and particularly young couples, are choosing the suburb as the area of their residence.

Unavoidably, the increase in population causes the generation of issues with public services. As the frequency of traffic congestion phenomena is noticeably increasing, public transportation methods, and particularly buses, are usually out of schedule. The absence of modern and smart technology to inform users real-time about delays and traffic information, has a negative impact on residents’ satisfaction. As a result, the tendency to replace public transports with private vehicles occurs and thus the problem of traffic is getting worse.

A significant amount of time is spent by Ypsonas Municipality to investigate solutions to address this problem. The type of solutions is classified in the context of Smart City technologies. The objective is to use low-power and low-cost sensors to provide real-time accurate information about the bus transportation and traffic services using mobile applications and sensor networks integrated with an IoT platform.

KIOS Research and Innovation Centre of Excellence (KIOS CoE) has shown an advanced expertise on solving transportation problems. The long-term collaboration with Transportation Organization of Nicosia District (OSEL) enabled the deployment of algorithms and the implementation of solution for the tracking of buses in order to address the issues of insufficient information to the bus users.

Our aim is to use our prior knowledge to aid Ypsonas Municipality to address the problems of bus tracking and traffic monitoring. The implementation of a user-friendly mobile application and a communication network would allow residents to real-time track bus schedules. We strongly believe that we have both the expertise and the motivation to address the social challenge raised by the municipality.