Week 11 – Artefact proposal and Reflection

Artefact Proposal:

My proposal for the development of artefact is a custom build application combine with other public APIs for monitoring realtime traffic and road conditions called CTMS (Collaborative Traffic Monitoring System). The CTMS supports personal smartphone as the primary deployment platform to capture and display realtime traffic information. The traffic information will be displayed in an intuitive map based UI with highlighted roads indicating the traffic conditions and the severity of the conditions displayed in different colors. The data collection process will be primarily passive meaning that the mobile application will be running in the background to collect geo-coordinates along with timestamps of each GPS data providing that the application is started. The data will be forwarded to a backend service responsible for calculating the overall traffic conditions based on the speed of the collective group of users/drivers in transit. There will also be a predictive component to the system to suggest light traffic roads to users/drivers based on historical information.

·         identify the community or types of community that your software will support and identify the needs of that community:

The primary focus is direct at vehicle owners who drive their own vehicle on a regular basis. The driving community is targeted due to the constant frustrating traffic congestion that is naturally part of the urban life. CTMS is aimed at supporting urban commuters who are interested in avoiding time loss during transit due to traffic congestion that many of us face every day by taking the most efficient suggested route. Future implementation will extend support for public transit commuters.

·         come up with an idea, taking into account the availability of resources, the time it will take, the skills you need to learn, the effort involved:

This idea is validated by the development team skills (myself) as well as remaining 3 weeks of development time available for planning, analysis, documentation and implementation/testing. Over the next week the development team (myself) will examine the best-in-class smartphone development platform (such as PhoneGap with HTML5) to ensure balance of user experience, development time and the comprehensiveness of various mobile OSes support. The client component will be likely developed in as a web based simulator to allow members of class COMP 650 to simulate real life driving conditions.

Reflection:

Throughout week 11 we have been tasked with coming up with ideas that align to all learnt materials in comp 650. Each suggested idea will be materialized in the next few weeks towards the end of this course which includes analysis, design, implementation and deployment of an actual solution. It took me some time before I settled for CTMS after listening to professor Dron and the discussions that fellow with everyone in the class of comp 650.

What I realized was that there are similar services offering currently in the marketplace that targets and rely on driving communities to share road conditions information. Notably Waze (http://www.waze.com/), an Israel based start-up is already providing free navigation service on multiple mobile platforms supported by the crowd-sourcing approach for user generated contents. A collaborative approach to generating traffic information and along the way, allows “super” user to fix the map if disjuncture of a road is discovered. It appears that Waze base map data are self-acquired via user generations and government support as well as other public domain sources rather than obtained from Navteq or Tele Atlas which prominent map sites such as Google Map and Bing Map are sourcing their map data from.

My intention was not to create a Waze clone (I have not heard of this company until it was mentioned in the forum) but to develop a solution with the intention of addressing similar needs in the driving community and along the way, provide my own design / implementation approach to meet the needs.

Dickson