TRAFFIC

Smart Routing and Data Management Systems

Existing intelligent infrastructure management solutions (e.g. road traffic information systems) provide limited information to update central controllers and end-users about the current status of the infrastructure, which they manage. Typically all users in the same geographical area receive the same information and hence make the same decisions resulting in non-optimal operation, and potentially some of the information could be dated. A key issue is the design of the communications infrastructure and protocols,which allow reliable communication between end-users and the core system for data collection and delivery. A requirement of these systems is timely creation and distribution of information to prevent over utilisation of the infrastructure.

Gathering and utilising data from infrastructure management systems poses significant scalability issues. Inparticular, as the number of monitoring nodes increases, a number of adjacent nodes may contain information relevant to a given location. Therefore these nodes must be enabled to coordinate as a group. In addition, many decisions about user services can be made based on local information only, without there being any requirement for this data to be sent to a central location. On the other hand, concerns could traverse many of these nodes, so the data management issues around service delivery become critical. The goal of this work programmeis to develop a scalable, multi-tiered communications system that enables large-scale infrastructure management.

What is the question that this WP addresses?

The primary objective of this work programme is to design and develop scalable communication and infrastructure management solutions. These solutions could support future systems associated with a “smart city” such as intelligent traffic management systems, waste systems, large-scale water schemes, energy infrastructures and telecommunications networks. Most of these systems will be required to collate, aggregate, and process large amounts of information sourced from heterogeneous sources and to perform smart routing of resources. In this context, algorithms,which relate and correlate large volumes of historic and real-time data are required. This work programme will deliver a scalable architecture to collect, aggregate, distribute, and consume heterogeneous information feeds and develop routing techniques for the resources. The use case considered here is for road traffic management, but could be applied to other infrastructures.

Why is this question significant?

Future smart cities will be reliant on large volumes of real-time information in order to enforce system management policies. With devices moving from a passive role to a more proactive one by generating real-time information, an unprecedented burden will be put on infrastructures to consistently handle large volumes of real-time data. As much of the collected data come from different sources (e.g. probes, intersection closed loops, manual entry) it has different formats, offers different levels of granularity and will be of different time scales.

How will the question be addressed?

This research will focus on building a scalable and dynamic framework to manage the whole life-cycle of real-time information feeds, from collection to formatting, distribution, storage, exploitation, and consumption. In order to achieve this goal more advanced intelligent traffic management solutions must be developed. With this solution, each vehicle in the road network can receive updated traffic information and use it to dynamically calculate its itinerary. In this vision, the complex traffic management task in a large city is performed by vehicles navigation systems based on timely and fine-grained traffic information feeds. This way, a significant part of the system complexity is pushed towards the edge of the network (vehicles), which allows the system to naturally scale up with the number of active vehicles.

This new scalable framework can be used to perform optimized traffic management in metropolitan areas through the delivery of vehicular navigation instructions and manage the whole life-cycle of a real-time traffic information feeds. It could also be applied to water, power or telecommunication systems that will be features of smart cities. The innovative aspects of the work programme will be articulated around the effective and integrated management of the information feeds and the development of the algorithms to smartly route the resources in the critical systems. This will enable environmentally friendly, safer and smarter mobility solutions in smart cities of the future.