St Petersburg University students come up with an application to search for free seats on local trains
Everyone who commutes knows that after boarding the train there may be no free seats in one train carriage while there may be many in another. Students in applied mathematics at St Petersburg University came up with an idea as to how solve this problem by introducing a web-application to search for occupied seats. The project by the students in mathematics at St Petersburg University focused on monitoring free seats on local trains. It was ranked second in the inter-university competition by the Samsung Academy in 2020.
Architecture
Where to sit?
Monitoring free seats on local trains is necessary to: ensure that passengers occupy seats more or less evenly across the train carriages; make the ticket checking easier; and make our commuting more comfortable and convenient. The application ‘Where to sit?’ was developed by students Nikita Antonov, Aleksandra Gavrilova, and Aleksandr Timofeev. They were under the guidance of Oleg Iakushkin, Assistant Lecturer in the Department of Computer Modelling and Multiprocessor Systems, and Ruslan Sevostianov. Assistant Lecturer in the Department of Computer Applications and Systems. The project was held within the framework of the contest Internet of Things by Samsung Academy.
Each seat on local trains should have an ultrasound transducer above it to track whether it is occupied or free. The information would be sent to the server via mobile services, suggested the authors of the project.
The application is connected with the YandexTimetable and will allow passengers to see online which seats are free. In Russia, there is no application that would be similar to this one. How the system works is shown by using a prototype and can be found in the videopresentation. More information about the architecture, equipment, and demo can be found at the web-site GitHub.
Opened in late 2018 in St Petersburg University, the laboratory ‘Samsung IoT Academy’ is headed by Professor Aleksandr Degtyarev at the Department of Computer Modelling and Multiprocessor Systems. Within an educational project, students in IT can have a course and get a certificate of advanced training in industrial Internet of Things. During two semesters, students learn to solve complex engineering tasks and work out an innovative project. The best of the developments are submitted to the Russia-wide contest that has about 50 projects submitted from all over Russia. Last academic year, students at St Petersburg University were the finalists with their intellectual system to control delivery ChainBox. At the Distributed Ledger Technologies Centre at St Petersburg University, students developed a smart riot-resistant seal to ensure GPS tracking and identify the situations when the packages are opened.