Data, data, everywhere

摘要

Jason Barnes looks at where the detection and monitoring sector is heading. In the future, there will be no such thing as an un-instrumented road. Just a short time ago, that could have been a quote from a high-level policy document but with the first arrivals of vehicles with 802.11p connectivity - the door-opener to Vehicle-to-X (V2X) applications - it's a statement which has increasing validity. The technology which uses our roads will also provide information on road conditions but V2X isn't the only game in town. Until recently the inductive loop was the only real choice, and then along came video, allowing traffic controllers to 'see' in the literal sense. More recently, innovations in technologies such as radar have shown that sometimes it is better without sight - an observation which holds equally true in the case of crowdsourced data using smart devices. Wider ITS trends such as the desire to retain the integrity of the road surface wherever possible by using non-intrusive solutions, the need to be cost-effective and the arrival of new neater and sometimes simpler technologies, are all influencing the sector. So are authorities facing massive redundancy in terms of the systems deployed or massive redundancy in terms of the mutually supporting data sets which a plethora of complementing technologies can offer?