System Design

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One-line project title: Traffic Monitoring

Project Summary

The purpose of this software project is to provide useful and essential information concerning traffic in a specific geographical area based on the time of the day, current weather, and traffic patterns history of that area. This information comes in handy for automobile drivers in choosing the best and easiest route to use at a given time, and it can also be used to plan for travels based on the best time.

The available traffic information services that include traffic.com, traffic, and yahoo give updates on the traffic conditions at the current time in a given locality (Jain et al., 2019). It is essential to have current information. Still, these sources more often are incomplete, making the user not to be able to make assumptions on the traffic conditions of an area when the updates are not given by the services.

Analyzing the historical traffic information that has been gathered over a long time duration is a vital idea. The information collected identifies locations that are commonly noted in travel advisory as having heavy traffic. Hence, the user can make accurate assumptions in the case that such an area is not listed. The services offered by this system include:

I. A route’s historic patterns between two end-points with indicated weather patterns and time of the day.

II. A traffic map that has indicated hotspots for traffic reviews, the severity of the traffic, weather conditions, and the given day of the week that traffic mostly occurs.

III. In the case that a route is predicted to have traffic congestion, the software could an alternative route for the road user or give a suggestion for an alternative time that users can use the same route when traffic is manageable.

Traffic patterns identify the number of traffic incidents reported with respect to the prevailing weather condition and time of the day.

Technology to Be Used in Data Collection and Preprocessing

Data collection will be a continuous process as the parameters keep changing, and for accuracy, a number of month’s data can be used. The data collection program design that will be used will be represented by an overall design and web reported retrieval module. For the web report retrieval module, it starts with a query of the webserver when given a postal code, parse the XML response to extract weather and traffic report, the report is stored as a database record, and report generated after 2 seconds. This program runs in an infinite loop as it retrieves the information for various cities periodically. We shall retrieve zip codes and store them in a local database that is accessed by the system users when searched.

The technology that we plan to use is RSS XML languages. Python programming will also be useful. Using the Yahoo traffic service, we can download current traffic conditions reports (http://maps.yahoo.com/traffic.). Three parameters are included, and they are minsev (minimum severity) of the traffic incident reported having a value range of 1 to 5 that represents a range of significance being Minor, moderate, major, and critical. Mag (magnification) is the second parameter showing the magnification level that will have 4 miles, 10 miles and 40 miles represented by 3,4, and 5. Csz represents zip code for a targeted area.

The input–process–output (IPO) model

The structure of the information processing program of our system will take up weather and traffic information as inputs from the environment and process the data to give an output that solves the problem presented (Braunschweig, 2018). The mobile app technology will be used to create this open system of traffic management. This is because smartphones have access to the location, which is an essential consideration.

Potential Obstacles

Data duplication is a potential obstacle where our system assumes that any duplicated data represents the same context, which may not be the case (Ducasse, Rieger, & Demeyer, 1999). This can be a source of error. In predicting traffic accurately, road construction and maintenance reports need to be added, but since they are short-term, we choose not to consider them. In the case that a user is using a route with road construction, the assumption can be wrong. The historical characterization of traffic by drivers may be different hence interviews with the drivers need to be conducted.

Other items of interest

The system will be developed to aid drivers to view the statistics in a rote and compare it with the present current conditions. We are also concerned about developing a system whose user-interface can be safely and quickly used by road users in real-time hence it should be having a sensitive touch screen and using a built-in. Finally, potential users have to be an interview to determine who is the most beneficiary of this system to help create a system that is user-centered (Chowdhury & Sadek, 2003).