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Government Cloud

Singapore road tests smart traffic cloud

By Robin Hicks | 9 December 2010

Singapore is trialing a traffic management system that could improve the monitoring of the city-state’s roads by using geo-location data captured from drivers’ smart phones.

GPS sensors in drivers’ smart phones can determine the location, direction of travel and speed of vehicles. The GPS data, captured in real-time, is hosted on a cloud platform and can be used to monitor – and predict – traffic conditions.

“It would be very costly to deploy traffic sensors all over the city. Since traffic sensors are only available on highways and major roads, why not make use of GPS sensors in drivers’ mobile phones to monitor traffic conditions?” said Dr Lim Hock Beng, Programme Director, Intelligent Systems Centre, Nanyang Technological University, who leads the research team behind the initiative.

Existing traffic analytics tools, such as IBM’s Traffic Prediction Tool (TPT), can achieve up to 85 per cent accuracy in predicting traffic volumne and speed 10 minutes ahead of time. “Traffic information collected via mobile phones can supplement the data from traffic sensors, and help to improve traffic prediction accuracy,” said Dr Lim.

The Smart Traffic Cloud, supported by the Infocomm Development Authority (IDA) under the Open call for Cloud Computing, will be hosted on Singtel’s Alatum cloud computing platform. The traffic data will be made available to application developer and users to develop novel location-based traffic applications.

On the question of privacy, Dr Lim noted that information on a driver’s journey would be aggregated, and not linked to the driver’s identity.

The Singapore team is collaborating with the University of California at Berkeley, which is working on a similar project in the San Francisco Bay Area.

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