A monitoring framework for intelligent transportation systems

Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) offer solutions to growing congestion in major urban areas. The methodologies used for gathering and processing transportation systems information, in real time, form the pillars of ITS. Current practices in traffic system monitoring are dominated by (1) monolithic software systems. (2) the use of point detectors for surveillance and (3) wire-line communication networks for data transmission. The information gathered is typically aggregated over 20-30 seconds and subsequently transmitted over copper wires or fiber optic cables to the nearest operations center. This approach is losing appeal due to the large maintainability of costs incurred due to detector reliability issues, the cost of building and maintaining wireline networks and software and potential traffic disruption during construction and maintenance operations. A potentially cost-effective framework for traffic network monitoring and prediction which relies upon terrestrial wireless technologies has been described. The framework adopts the Service-oriented Architecture to enable dynamic composability of software services, which reduces the cost of building newer ITS applications. The framework involves the use of traveling vehicles as probes transmitting information around the surrounding traffic environment as they progress through the road network. This enables vehicle tracking, speed detection and congestion avoidance. Within the ITS monitoring framework, the municipal Mesh Network (WMN) infrastructure is used to gather and transport real-time traffic data collected from vehicles. Cost-effectiveness is achieved by taking advantage of the already existing WMN infrastructure and the widespread popularity of Bluetooth devices. The design and implementation of the proposed framework was accompanied with preliminary performance results.