An intelligent IoT-based positioning system for theme parks

Abstract

With the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT) and ubiquitous presence of sensor nodes, positioning technologies have become a topic of interest among researchers. While the applications of positioning systems are very vast, determining the position of moving sensor nodes, finding missing people in large areas, and object tracking are among the most popular ones. The focus of this paper is to propose a positioning system to locate missing people in theme parks. Currently, radio frequency identification (RFID) systems are used in modern theme parks to locate lost visitors. In these systems, a wristband with active RFID tag is given to each visitor and RFID readers are deployed in predetermined locations. When a visitor is in the communication range of a reader, its location can be estimated based on the location of the reader. Therefore, the accuracy of these systems is relevant to the communication range of readers. Another limitation of RFID-based systems is due to the fact that readers cannot be placed in communication range of each other as they can interference with each other. It is clear that the only way to increase the accuracy of such systems is by increasing the number of readers and decreasing the communication range of each reader. In this paper, a Bluetooth low energy (BLE)-based system is proposed to be used in theme parks for locating lost visitors. The advantage of using BLE is due to the fact that it uses frequency hopping spread spectrum (FHSS) thus readers can be placed in communication range of each other without severe interference. In the proposed method, at first, the optimal places for deploying readers are obtained using ant colony optimization (ACO). Then, a fuzzy approach is used to increase the accuracy of the system. Three different signal levels are defined to be used in our fuzzy system based on which the location of visitors can be estimated. By using three levels of signal strength, the accuracy of the system is increased compared with the similar system with the similar number of readers. The simulation results show that the accuracy of the system is improved using this method, and the cost of the system is decreased as BLE readers are much less expensive than their RFID counterparts.