A Flexible System Architecture for Acquisition and Storage of Naturalistic Driving Data

Abstract

Innovation in intelligent transportation systems relies on analysis of high-quality data. In this paper, we describe the design principles behind our data management infrastructure. The principles we adopt place an emphasis on flexibility and maintainability. This is achieved by breaking up code into a modular design that can be run on many independent processes. Message passing over a publish–subscribe network enables interprocess communication and promotes data-driven execution. By following these principles, rapid prototyping and experimentation with new sensing modalities and algorithms are possible. The communication library underpinning our proposed architecture is compared against several popular communication libraries. Features designed into the system make it decentralized, robust to failure, and amenable to scaling across multiple machines with minimal configuration. Code written using the proposed architecture is compact, transparent, and easy to maintain. Experimentation shows that our proposed architecture offers a high performance when compared against alternative communication libraries.