Context-aware mobile service for routing the fastest subway path

The rapid growth of the IT industry during the last few decades has increased demands on mobile devices such as PDAs, cellular phones, and GPS navigation systems. With emerging concepts of context-aware computing, the mobile devices can provide mobile users with timely information by using not only common knowledge but also environmental context such as current time and location. Lately, the context-aware applications have been actively investigated and have been contributed to numerous application areas such as real-time electronic catalogues and navigation systems for tourists. In this paper, we propose a new context-aware application for finding the fastest subway route. We have developed the proposed application as an implemented system named Optimize Your Time System (OYT System, for short). A terminal device of the OYT System is equipped with a GPS receiver and the system’s server contains a timetable of all trains in a target subway system. On perceiving users’ context such as current time and location automatically from GPS, the OYT System can display the optimal route which takes the shortest time for the user to reach the specified destination. In this paper, we present details of the OYT System and some experimental examples.