CrowdNav:Information Dissemination System for Traffic Enhancement

Abstract

In this work we present a traffic information dissemination system that seeks to deliver relevant traffic information to drivers to help make their driving experience more efficient, pleasant and safe. The system uses the crowd of drivers as the main source of information. The crowd reports information about traffic either directly to our system’s central server or to social networks. In case the information is reported to a social network our system architecture allows the integration of social networks as a traffic information source. It also allows the integration of other traffic information sources such as local traffic monitoring agencies. Our system aggregates all traffic information and delivers it to drivers subscribed to the system when they demand it. In addition, our system provides an efficient navigation service that it takes into account the current traffic conditions when planning a route. Furthermore, it periodically checks if there are new traffic events that appear on the user’s current route in which case the system will automatically give the user an alternate route. We implement a prototype of our system that use the social networks as a traffic information source and through the prototype evaluation we show that the prototype of our system indeed delivers relevant traffic information to drivers and performs intelligent navigation.