A Research Project Submitted In Partial Fulfillment Of The Requirements For The Award Of Masters Of Science In Data Communications In The Faculty Of Computing And Information Management at KCA University.
The problem of traffic congestion and difficulties in management of road networks has been a major concern in many countries. The countries have addressed these problems using a myriad of solutions. The use of ICT to manage road networks has been fronted as one of the best solutions and great strides have been made in various countries to utilize it in road traffic management.
My research looks at how ICT has been utilized to manage the various transport systems and offer a variety of services to end users, more particularly in the area of traffic management and mitigation of traffic congestion especially in the developed world.
Various systems have been employed for example the adaptive traffic lights that change based on an analysis of the existing real time traffic information, collision avoidance systems, weather warning systems, traffic information for train and subway systems in the UK and China, route guidance systems for route selection using GPS systems for example tom tom systems for optimal route selection in south Africa, car tracking systems are also used by companies to manage fleets. Various technologies, software and hardware that are employed in these systems have also been analyzed.
Most of these systems function independently and lack an interactive platform where data can be acquired and received freely from both parties. Therefore my research aims to integrate these systems by providing suitable interfaces and having a central databases from which better utility of the data can be achieved. Better data capture platforms and dissemination methods will be researched on and their utilization in a number of key systems in transport management will be evaluated with an aim of coming up with an integrated intelligent transport management system capable of offering a number of services to end users in the most convenient way possible.
The research has addressed the integration of traffic information collection mechanisms and the management of a central database capable of running various applications to offer different functionalities such as incident management, traffic analysis and management, weather warning system.