Cloud-centric Applications Research Articles

BIGSEA: A Big Data analytics platform for public transportation information

Analysis of public transportation data in large cities is a challenging problem. Managing data ingestion, data storage, data quality enhancement, modelling and analysis requires intensive computing and a non-trivial amount of resources. In EUBra-BIGSEA (Europe–Brazil Collaboration of Big Data Scientific Research Through Cloud-Centric Applications) we address such problems in a comprehensive and integrated way. EUBra-BIGSEA provides a platform for building up data analytic workflows on top of elastic cloud services without requiring skills related to either programming or cloud services. The approach combines cloud orchestration, Quality of Service and automatic parallelisation on a platform that includes a toolbox for implementing privacy guarantees and data quality enhancement as well as advanced services for sentiment analysis, traffic jam estimation and trip recommendation based on estimated crowdedness. All developments are available under Open Source licenses (http://github.org/eubr-bigsea, https://hub.docker.com/u/eubrabigsea/).

An Integrated Big and Fast Data Analytics Platform for Smart Urban Transportation Management

Smart urban transportation management can be considered as a multifaceted big data challenge. It strongly relies on the information collected into multiple, widespread, and heterogeneous data sources as well as on the ability to extract actionable insights from them. Besides data, full stack (from platform to services and applications) Information and Communications Technology (ICT) solutions need to be specifically adopted to address smart cities challenges. Smart urban transportation management is one of the key use cases addressed in the context of the EUBra-BIGSEA ( Europe-Brazil Collaboration of Big Data Scientific Research through Cloud-Centric Applications) project. This paper specifically focuses on the City Administration Dashboard, a public transport analytics application that has been developed on top of the EUBra-BIGSEA platform and used by the Municipality stakeholders of Curitiba, Brazil, to tackle urban traffic data analysis and planning challenges. The solution proposed in this paper joins together a scalable big and fast data analytics platform, a flexible and dynamic cloud infrastructure, data quality and entity matching algorithms as well as security and privacy techniques. By exploiting an interoperable programming framework based on Python Application Programming Interface (API), it allows an easy, rapid and transparent development of smart cities applications.