TrafficPulse: A mobile GISystem for transportation

Today municipalities around the world spend millions of dollars to understand the dynamics of their transportation infrastructure. Traditional approaches for traffic data collection rely on a fixed sensor infrastructure (e.g., inductive loop detectors), and because these sensors are expensive to deploy and maintain, the traffic data coverage is limited to main highways and major intersections. This limited information hinders municipalities to achieve efficient traffic management and control. To address this problem, we develop TrafficPulse, a mobile GISystem platform for transportation applications. For the client front-end, we develop the TrafficPulse mobile application that collects traffic data by integrating participatory sensing, opportunistic sensing, and offline data collection module. For the server back-end, we develop Geopot cloud, a cloud-based geo-location data service for mobile applications. In order to demonstrate the potential benefit of this system, we also develop a carpooling recommendation system to analyze user-shared content and provide a recommendation service to TrafficPulse users. In this paper, we describe our system architecture and experiences, allowing our paper to be used as a reference for other developers who want to develop their own transportation applications.