A Generic Methodological Framework for Cyber-ITS: Using Cyber-infrastructure in ITS Data Analysis Cases

Abstract

This paper presents a method to capture the computational intensity and computing resource requirements of data analysis in intelligent transportation systems (ITS). These requirements can be transformed into a generic methodological framework for Cyber-ITS, mainly consisting of region-based ITS data divisions and tasks scheduling for processing, to support the efficient use of cyber-infrastructure (CI). To characterize the computational intensity of a particular ITS data analysis, the computational transformation is performed by data-centric and operation-centric transformation functions. The application of this framework is illustrated by two ITS data analysis cases: multi-sensor data fusion for traffic state estimation by integrating rough set theory with Dempster-Shafer (D-S) evidence theory, and geospatial computation on Global Positioning System (GPS) data for advertising value evaluation. To make the design of generic parallel computing solutions feasible for ITS data analysis in these cases, an approach is developed to decouple the region-based division from specific high performance computer (HPC) architecture and implement a prototype of the methodological framework. Experimental results show that the prototype implementation of the framework can be applied to divide the ITS data analysis into a load-balanced set of computing tasks, therefore facilitating the parallelized data fusion and geospatial computation to achieve remarkable speedup in computation time and throughput, without loss in accuracy.