emissions from vehicles.
The first part of the service is its pre-trip part, which enables user to choose the best route according to the driver’s criteria such as: quickest, shortest, environmentally most friendly, avoiding toll roads and congestion charge areas, by required arrival time etc. It also inform the driver about traffic signs, prohibited manoeuvres, vehicle restrictions, points of interest, tourist information, speed camera data and much more on the chosen route.
The second part of the service is its on-trip part, which enables user to stay informed and in control when he / she’s on the road. Whenever some significant situation occurs on the chosen rout, by using voice messaging alert system, My Route Mobile Pocket Guide service will inform the driver of a new situation and suggest the smartest possible action in order to achieve required arrival time and budget.
My Route Mobile Pocket Guide is suitable as much for people (private drivers) as for businesses. It can be used in the field of transport, urban planning end economics, by policymakers and consultants dealing with mobility issues, by authorities dealing with traffic flow, it could supply traffic information to (local) governments.
Technical approach
Implementation of My Route Mobile Pocket Guide requires at least further elements:
- Easily accessible application with road map of assigned area (town, region, country, cross - border )
- Central database system (traffic and weather; current and forecasted) with update function and the search function providing information along a specified route and connected to an SMS alert centre
- The GPS receiver with Bluetooth technology to ensure the best possible reception wherever the driver / traveller goes
- Subscription model to information flow
Geographical scope
My Route Mobile Pocket Guide is suitable as well for long distance journeys as for daily commuting, and applicable in local, regional and national as well as European level. The level itself depends directly on the Central database system scope.
Data Needs
Full realization of My Route Mobil Pocket Guide idea mostly depends on combination of current and forecasted traffic and weather data. There is a need for both, temporal and spatial data coverage. Raw known data can’t be used directly – data fusion or integration is necessary as well as value adding aggregation.
Data for pre-trip part of the service are mostly spatial. Database should include:
- Road selection: road, highway, roads with no toll, roads with no congestion charges;
- Route selection: shortest, quickest, cheapest, environmentally most friendly, safest;
- Resting places selection: position, purpose, size, working time
- Travel time information
- Weather and traffic forecast data
Real-time data or on-trip data are mostly temporally:
- Real-time weather data
- Weather nowcasting data
- Traffic real-time data
- Traffic nowcasting data including "breaking news data"
Pre-trip data should be modified and corrected during the trip by fresh real-time data or “breaking news data” – information about incident events on the route like car crash caused jam or similar.
Such service requires permanent communication between personal communication device (cellular phone for example) and Central database which could be local or regional. Communication frequency should be in minutes or Central base should have information about all users in its region and send fresh information including “breaking news” when they occur.
Some real-time data could be “two-way” data, means that device collects some data from vehicle sensor and sends to Central database. But, such activity has some legal problems which should be solved in advance.
Route Rainfall Prediction Demo
As a demonstration of the kind of pre-trip service discussed here, there now is an operational ROADIDEA web site for a Route Rainfall Prediction in Holland. It uses rainfall prediction 1 by 1 km grid data up to hours ahead to prediction the amount of rainfall given a certain departure time. This kind of prediction is important for road exposed to the weather, such as bicyclists, motor cyclists, scooter drivers and pedestrians. More information on this demo can be found here.
DISCUSSION AREA
Marcus Wigan (DEMIS): the most advanced mobile phones ( iMate, N95, iPhone) have GPS built in plus good application programming interfaces-- this would suggest that targeting these devices and their built in capacities would be worthwhile, as they are all at the top end of the price scale, and thus owned by people posisbly more likely to pay for extra facilities..
Mikko Tarkiainen (VTT):
Here is briefly about the products and services that are already on the market.
Real-time traffic information is also available for Personal Navigation Devices (PND) via Traffic Message Channel (TMC) and connected PNDs via GPRS connection. Mobile navigation (smart phones) applications get real time traffic info via GPRS (e.g. Nokia Maps http://europe.nokia.com/A4984203).
User can get real time traffic and weather alerts on time to navigators (via TMC or GPRS) and real time traffic information should be up-to-date. Traffic and weather alerts are provided for selected route in the PND or mobile navigator. Only problem is, if user has not set the destination into navigator (e.g. when commuting on familiar route). Traffic information usually covers mainly highway network, but e.g. in Finland incidents are reported and included into traffic information from all roads. Navigators (e.g. Tomtom) provides estimated delay times for incidents. Tomtom HD Traffic receives up-to-date traffic information in every 3 minutes and utilises it in route calculation (http://www.tomtom.com/services/service.php?id=2).
Real time traffic information providers combine information from various sources: E.g. Destia provides up-to-date information on incidents, accidents, congestion, major road works, dangerous road surface conditions etc. Predictive traffic information is already available e.g. from INRIX (http://www.inrix.com/), TrafficCast International, Journey Dynamics etc. based on combination of vehicle probe-based road speed profiles and the modelling metadata such as planned events, weather, vehicle type and driving behaviour. Tomtom IQ Routes and Navteq Traffic optimise routing based on information about real average speeds (historical data) on roads and speed limits (better than only speed limit information) (http://www.tomtom.com/page/iq-routes). Speed limit information is also available via PNDs based on information from road/map database or speed limit sign recognition with camera. Japanese multi-modal navigation provider NAVITIME has launched service also in Europe, which provides (multi-modal), including walking, driving, and a variety of public transportation methods, both PC and mobile application and CO2 emission data (http://www.navitime.com/mobile/userguide/index.act). Google Maps provides routing for drivers and public transport users (http://www.google.com/transit) on www-pages and also on mobile (http://www.google.com/mobile/default/maps-transit.html).
There is no reason to implement new application for this idea as there are already similar products on the market (connected PNDs and smart phone navigation applications. Of course these products and services are not “ready” and there is lot of development needed before all functions are usable and provides value added information that user really needs. It is hard to find any new innovation from the general description of this idea and we should look into several years ahead. Innovations might be found in user needs of specific user groups?
Anyway, there is lot of stuff already available and this area is developing fast.