A TRAVELLER INFORMATION PLATFORM FOR MODERN SMART CITIES

摘要

Commuters in modern smart cities need a wide variety of traveller information to be provided to them for taking the right decisions. Drivers need accurate traffic information on urban and suburban roads, parking and electric vehicle charging availability, weather information, dynamic toll rates, fuel prices and so on. Commuters on public transport require bus and train arrival times, traffic-based public transport travel times, public transport breakdown information and so on. Finally, with the growth of inter-modal travel within mega-cities, there is a need to also provide multimodal traveller services that integrate these and other relevant information to provide route options along with travel time estimation, estimated time of arrival and journey plans. Smart cities also have sensors (cameras, light sensors, noise sensors, etc.) deployed through the city to pick up additional data that can be fused to augment regular information and services. Such services and information would be provided over multiple media such as over radio, internet or mobile internet. On the other hand, smart cities can use the massive amounts of data collected within their systems to understand the city's mobility needs and to better plan and react. The data can be used in offline and real-time analyses for short-term and long-term prediction. In this paper, we present a unified traveller information platform for modern smart cities. We discuss the types of data that such a system handles and show how outputs are used within different systems. We discuss interactions with external systems and suggest how the platform can be extended by integrating feedback from client applications to better meet the needs of commuters and cities. Finally, we highlight the key challenges of developing and deploying such a platform and suggest some of the methods to meet these challenges.