Transport infrastructure as a service

In order to achieve efficient urban traffic management, cities need to deploy not only the technologies for traffic monitoring, but also dedicated traffic management platforms, which can integrate all the data coming from the different monitoring technologies so as to calculate and provide meaningful real time information and strategies either for their own purpose as operators or for end users. All this has an enormous cost for cities. The innovation proposed by Instant Mobility is to use the cloud capabilities of Future Internet for innovative traffic management services, thus eliminating the need to buy specific platforms.

Transport agencies will be able to use existing infrastructure‐based technologies, such as inductive loops, dedicated short‐range communication (DSRC) beacon‐based technologies, closed circuit television cameras (CCTV), automatic number plate recognition systems (ANPR), etc, for data collection. Alongside this data, they will also have access to information from other sources (social networks, Wi-Fi devices, etc), as all of this data will be available in the cloud. They will be able to integrate these multiple sources of traffic and mobility data to provide services such as: a complete representation of current traffic conditions over the network, travel time estimations and forecasts, wide area strategic traffic control, Real Time Traffic Information (RTTI) provision for end users and multimodal services, and dynamic routing guidance depending of the road network condition in real time.

Real-time traffic and route information

The vehicle acts as a probe sending relevant vehicle data that can be useful for traffic estimation (position, direction, speed, use of braking pedal, gears info, etc) to a traffic service on the Internet. These data are mashed‐up with other sensor data coming from the road infrastructure. Drivers can receive real‐time traffic information over the full road network on their personal device through an on-line and an always up-to-date map including traffic data (continuous map download and updates) so as to optimize the route.

Floating passenger data collection

The collected relevant vehicle data allow density and position measurements over the transport network, which are then used by transport operators and organizing authorities to optimize the traffic service.

Virtualized intersection intelligence

Not only the traffic control operations are hosted in the cloud, but at the same time secure virtual local traffic light controllers are used, connected with the traffic centre, reducing the amount of hardware (and costs) required for each intersection.

Cooperative traffic signal control

Ad‐hoc networks are created in the cloud between clusters of vehicles and the traffic management infrastructure, offering drivers a recommended speed to avoid stopping and adapting traffic signals to real time demand. The service will use information from both vehicles and infrastructure to formulate strategies to achieve the optimization of the network operation, improving traffic flow fluency harmonising vehicles speeds with the traffic control strategies.

Area-wide optimization strategies

This application provides a modular solution for collecting data from different sources and mashing it up into useful information that can feed algorithms for traffic flow prediction, including in non-monitored zone, for example linking to any 3rd party data in a city that directly or indirectly collects traffic information.