IT AND THE CARPOOLING HABITS

Abstract

Mobility to the job place is one of the problems in today’s society, since using private vehicle to attend workplace is the most usual and, in many cases, the only mean of transport. To reduce the daily problems, faced by cities and city councils related to energy use, greenhouse effect gas, atmospheric and acoustic pollution, which we can add the emotional ones, such stress caused by daily commuting, many policies have been set off in order to avoid further social and economical damages and competitiveness ones, too.In this paper a new software application to reduce the problems caused by the private vehicles for daily commuting is presented. This application has been developed by the Castilla y León Technological Institute (ITCL) and the device is made up of a software part and a hardware one. Its hardware consists of several electronic devices of its own design - as users of the application – each of them composed of a GPRS (General Packet Radio Service) modem, a GPS (General Positioning System) receiver, a communication interface, a radio frequency reader RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) and several communication antennas. Software will manage the request between users to share a car, the route recording and the communication control between the electronic devices (car location, speed and number of passengers). This data is recorded in a remote server and it is accessible on the Web. Regarding the gathered information, mobility policies can be adopted according to the kilometers, the days, the shared vehicles, compensations payment, etc.