Visualization of the public transportation infrastructure services using virtual reality standards

Abstract

Public infrastructure services like transportation, energy, air quality, water quality, etc., are characterized by a presence of rich information that can be leveraged to provide more efficient support to public infrastructure decision-making. That information has significant geospatial and temporal characteristics and consists of large quantities of data from a variety of data sources that should be stored efficiently and then integrated in a common framework. A mapping between the data elements and their spatial and temporal locations may be used to provide service information (e.g. traffic conditions) in a meaningful form. Service information is, in general, complex, multi-dimensional , physical or abstract information that is intrinsically difficult to represent and manipulate. Visualization techniques, in conjuction with simulation and data modeling can be extremely useful tools to address many public infrastructure issues and problems. In our previous work, a virtual reality based interface for simulation and evaluation of airport Automated People Movers (APMs) has been implemented using Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML). That work has been extended to use Extended 3D (X3D) virtual reality standard. Since the X3D standard is based on the Extensible Markup Language (XML), the integration with the available data sources is improved. The paper focuses on issues related to public infrastructures serivces in transportation and how to include and visualize information from the real world in a virtual environment. The real world in transportation includes building structures, streets and other guide-ways, vehicles, pedestrians, control signals, etc. while the transportation data sources provide information about vehicular and pedestrian traffic and current control strategies.