A General Approach to Exploit Available Traffic Data for a Smarter City: Biplav Srivastava, Raymond Rudy, Jane Xu, Brent Miller, Alberto Giacomel, Steven Wysmuller IBM

摘要

Traffic is an important indicator of a city's health. Presence of traffic indicates movement of people and goods, and thus economic vitality. However, if left unchecked, excess traffic leads to congestion that results in wasted time and fuel, impacts the environment through increased emissions and negatively affects the qualify of life for citizens. To manage a city's transportation and environmental goals effectively, accurate data is required - beginning with basic information such as counting traffic passing on a street. In this article, we present a general approach for collecting traffic data from a multitude of sources, organizing that data for consumption by multiple parties and exploiting the data productively by many diverse users. We illustrate this approach with a case study in Boston, Massachusetts, USA.