An Efficient Information Services-Centric Framework for Commuter

Abstract

One of the major objectives of Advanced Traffic Management Systems (ATMS) is to reduce traffic congestion in urban environments by improving the efficiency of utilization of existing transport infrastructures. Many creative and efficient technologies have been developed over the years. Although commuters, especially drivers, take a critical part in containing traffic congestion problems, they are playing a passive role in the traffic-management ecosystem. Considerably, this is due to the information asymmetry between ATMS decision makers and commuters; what is missing is a matching mechanism to create a bridge between information providers and information consumers in the mobile environment. The authors’ solution provides an efficient services-centric framework for delivering pertinent information to commuters. Probe vehicles are used to estimate the real-time traffic flow and disseminate this information effectively to users’ mobile devices. A 2-level indexing scheme is designed to effectively index the grid cells which contain the spatial information and a location-aware mobile application and back-end services are also implemented. Processed information is disseminated to users’ mobile devices through wireless means and presented in a user friendly interface. Experimental results show that this system is scalable and responsive.