A visual analytics system for metropolitan transportation

Abstract

With the increasing availability of metropolitan transportation data, such as those from vehicle GPSs (Global Positioning Systems) and road-side sensors, it becomes viable for authorities, operators, as well as individuals to analyze the data for a better understanding of the transportation system and possibly improved utilization and planning of the system. We report our experience in building the VAST (Visual Analytics for Smart Transportation) system. Our key observation is that metropolitan transportation data are inherently visual as they are spatio-temporal around road networks. Therefore, we visualize traffic data together with digital maps and support analytical queries through this interactive visual interface. As a case study, we demonstrate VAST on real-world taxi GPS and meter data sets from 15, 000 taxis running two months in a Chinese city of over 10 million population. We discuss the technical challenges in data cleaning, storage, visualization, and query processing, and offer our first-hand lessons learned from developing the system.

Visual Analytics of Traffic Congestion Propagation Path with Large Scale Camera Data

“…The ring and axial respectively represent different time granularity, while of the color shades represent the attribute values. This method has been applied in VAIT (visual analytics for intelligent transportation) to present a ring-style visual fingerprinting for visualizing regional traffic in the T-Watcher system [11] .…”

“…In this subsection, the performance of traffic congestion propagation path estimation is compared to Historical average method (HAM) and Autoregressive integrated moving average model (ARIMA) [11] . The HAM is a widely used long-term prediction method, which calculates the predict result by using the average of speed values in the same historical time intervals.…”

Travic

“…This interface is used for most live maps based on GPS and sensor data, see e.g [1], [2] or [3]. But for temporal coverage, the frequency of such requests has to be high (especially if vehicle movements should be smooth).…”