Delivering visual pertinent information services for commuters

One of the major objectives of Advanced Traffic Management Systems (ATMS) is to reduce traffic congestion in urban environments by improving the efficiency of utilization of existing infrastructures. Many creative and efficient technologies have been developed over the years. Although, commuters especially drivers take a critical part in containing traffic congestion problems, they are playing a passive role in the traffic-management ecosystem. Considerably, this is due to the information asymmetry between ATMS decision makers and commuters; what is missing is a matching mechanism to create a bridge between information providers and information consumers in a mobility environment. We solve this dilemma through implementing visual pertinent information services for commuters. We use probe vehicles to estimate the real-time traffic flow and disseminate this information effectively to users´ mobile devices. We propose a 2-level indexing scheme to effectively index the grid cells which contain the spatial information. Processed information is disseminated to users through wireless means and presented in a user friendly interface on users´ mobile devices. We have implemented a location-aware mobile application and back-end services. Experimental results show that our system is effective and scalable.