A GPS server with road mapping and data mining for traffic analysis.

Abstract

Traffic control and management currently requires high-tech computerized solutions as opposed to the manual methods that commonly involve the use of traffic policemen, traffic lights and safety cameras. Collection and analysis of road traffic data is a key requirement towards establishment of traffic conditions on any given road segments. The research explores a slightly newer technology, the GPS technology incorporated with road mapping focused at traffic data collection and analysis of traffic conditions. A GPS data receiver application and traffic analysis system was developed that collects GPS traffic data and provides the ability to monitor and analyse traffic scenarios on the roads for instance the speed of traffic for any given road segment. The system also provides planners on the road usage patterns for analysis and decision making. All these aspects can be analysed both in real-time and historically basing on the fact that historical data is captured and stored for future use. The additional capability of automatic email alerts on over speeding vehicles serves as a better informatory tool to the Traffic Police Department. The findings show that there is a great need for real-time traffic information analysis due to the tremendous variability in traffic scenarios in major cities like Nairobi in Kenya. The system has been used to show changes in position, speed and directions of vehicles travelling on the Kenyan roads with the speed of traffic and road usage pattern algorithms developed and effectively put in place. The established centralized GPS Server database infrastructure gives room for any kinds of analysis requiring the stored GPS traffic data in a distributed client-server environment. Using the geographic components in collected GPS data and visualizing by mapping provides a clearer view of the traffic conditions for any given region. Challenges facing the existing systems could be mitigated through the adoption of the GPS based system.