Traffic Data Analytics Platform

Case Introduction:

The product development was done for a US startup catering to municipal corporations of cities. The product enables city traffic managers in selecting the best signaling systems timing plans to smartly manage traffic flows across corridors. MVP was developed over 6 months period using agile development and time & expense basis. Key objectives of the systems were:

• Give a view of all the city corridors’ performance based on the metrics of slowness, saturation, volume at a single glance to the city traffic manager on a single map view.
• Give timing plans for the signaling systems of the city corridors.
• Help improve the city corridor performances by the decision support system built.

Solution

Time-series traffic data containing information about the number of vehicles on corridors, speed of moving vehicles, signaling systems, etc. is collected from various sources. Advanced analytics algorithms process the data and give insights to city traffic managers in selecting the best signaling systems timing plans to smartly manage traffic flows across corridors. Data is plotted on intuitive map views. Following were the key modules developed:

• Traffic Data Orchestrator: This involved ingestion of traffic data from various third-party sources. The big data was processed via customized ETL job pipelines.
• Advanced Analytics Engine: Customized advanced analytics algorithms were used to process time-series traffic data. The output of the algorithms is the timing plans for operating the signaling systems and corridor performance numbers such as slowness, saturation, volume.
• Dashboard & Reports Engine: Various map view driven dashboards are shown which give the traffic managers deep insights into the data crunched by the analytics engine. At a single glance, the traffic manager is able to select the best possible timing plans calculated for the signaling systems.

Solution Impact:

• Potential Traffic Jam reduction by 10% – 20%
• Achieved data acceleration by building state of art, scalable, cost-effective, fully automated advanced analytics engine.
• Used Spark to a great effect to achieve data velocity for processing complexity posed by data variety of unstructured and structured formats.
• Powerful dashboards using ECharts to show multitude of data and numbers at one glance for efficient decision making by traffic managers.