Development of a mobile application for real-time traffic monitoring & prediction

• Main Author: Rauf Ansar
• Other Authors: Justin Dauwels
• Format: Theses and Dissertations
• Language: English
• Published: 2015
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/65193
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Advanced traveler information systems (ATISs) are becoming the key component towards effective utilization of existing urban traffic infrastructure. ATIS embodies the technological framework that disseminate valuable information like traffic, incidents, weather alerts and route details to travelers in real-time. Smartphones, with their ever increasing capabilities are considered to be one of the most efficient mode of delivering this information. Travelers utilize provided information to choose less congested paths and consequently decrease their travel time. In that way ATIS reduce the total delay, improve the user's comfort and satisfaction, decrease the pollution and noise at congestion sites and enhance the overall productivity within a city. The aim of this research is to develop an Android based smartphone application that delivers the compressed traffic prediction of Singapore road network (developed earlier) , along with traffic incidents reports and weather updates in real-time to users. The project commenced with the study of Android application development and GIS based application development, with the aim to provide traffic information in a geographic context i.e. on a map. OneMap Singapore and ArcGIS runtime SDK for Android is used for visualization and implementing GIS functionalities. The project has distributed architecture with traffic prediction of compressed network being done on the server in real-time with refresh rate of five minutes. These prediction files are downloaded by the smartphone application in real-time using secure FTP connection and used to refresh user interface. Data for traffic incident is fetched from Land Transport Authority (LTA), Singapore 's online datasets. Supporting GIS functionalities including geocoding, reverse geocoding and weather updates were also implemented. Testing and debugging was done at each step to validate the implementation.