A software platform for smart data-driven intelligent transport applications

Abstract

Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) are vital to increase safety and reduce congestion problems. ITS can support several applications such as emergency management, automatic road enforcement, variable speed limits, collision avoidance systems, dynamic traffic light sequence and many more. These applications use heterogeneous technologies for sensing, communications, and computation. A number of sensing technologies have been used for the ITS applications such as cameras, sensors, inductive loop detection to know the contextual information of the given environment. These technologies are measuring almost the same information but in various formats. Similarly, several technologies are widely used for short and long range communications within ITS. Future, ITS will require wireless communication among vehicles and the road side infrastructure. Furthermore, ITS applications require realtime computation due to critical functions that need to provide realtime feedback to the end-users. In this paper, we proposed and developed a software platform to solve the challenging issues that came from sensing, communication and computation within ITS applications. The platform can process data from heterogeneous sources and makes sure that data availability and quality are maintained. Moreover, the proposed software platform is able to analyze data from heterogeneous sources to find valuable insights accordingly. Finally, we designed and developed a visualization layer to communicate valuable insights from the collected data to the end-users by exploiting various visualization techniques.