Where Is My Bus? An AI-Based Smart College Bus Tracking and Arrival-Time Information System

Students who depend on college buses often have no reliable way to know where the bus is or when it will reach their stop. This paper presents Where Is My Bus?, a smart college bus tracking and management system designed as a single role-based mobile application with six modules: Student, Parent, Staff, Driver, Bus Coordinator and Admin. The driver’s smartphone supplies live GPS positions, which a Node.js/Express server validates, stores and serves to a Google Maps interface together with a last-updated indicator. Arrival time is estimated by a Random Forest regression model trained on historical trip data, with a route-distance and speed baseline used when data are insufficient. Firebase Cloud Messaging delivers stop alerts and SOS or breakdown notifications, while Lost & Found, report submission, bus-fee photo upload and route management support daily operations. The paper reviews smartphone-based, hardware-based and arrival-time-prediction studies on campus and public buses, identifies seven practical gaps, and maps each gap to a design decision. Because the system needs only a smartphone and software, it adds no per-bus hardware cost. Field results are not yet available; an evaluation plan based on mean absolute error (MAE), root mean squared error (RMSE) and update reliability is defined instead.