Vehicle location data drives new apps

Since the early 1990s, a growing number of trucking companies, public-safety agencies, courier firms and others have used automatic vehicle location, or AVL, technology to manage their fleets. As prices for global positioning system receivers have dropped, consumers and businesses have embraced the technology in the form of onboard navigation systems, which tell drivers where they are and point the way to where they need to be.

Now, AVL systems are starting to do double duty. Enterprises are using GPS technology for secondary purposes, such as monitoring real-time traffic conditions and telling riders when the next bus will arrive at a stop.

Inrix, a Microsoft spinoff, has perhaps the most ambitious plans to date for harnessing GPS data to derive traffic information. Inrix is collecting data used by trucking companies, local delivery firms, taxi services, utilities and others nationwide through agreements with companies that sell AVL and fleet-management systems. Its proprietary software aggregates and processes that data, including latitude/longitude coordinates, vehicle speed and heading. It then estimates current traffic speeds and predicts future speeds on highways, secondary roads and side streets in major metropolitan areas — using data from various departments of transportation, toll authorities, weather services and other public sources — to supplement the GPS data in its calculations.

The service is called Dust Network, which was inspired by Wi-Fi mesh networks, said Scott Sedlik, the company’s vice president of marketing. In a mesh network, many individual communications nodes combine to create a communications cloud.

“We took that concept and are applying it to our concept of aggregating thousands of different data points from many different sources to provide real-time and predictive traffic information,” he said.

Inrix sells its traffic information to businesses that provide it to end-users via the Web, cell phones, portable navigation systems and other media. For example, individuals access the traffic reports through the Microsoft Network, Cingular’s cell phone network, the TomTom onboard navigation system and Clear Channel’s Total Traffic Network, the company said.

Sedlik would not identify the AVL service providers that license their GPS data or trade it to Inrix for traffic information, but he indicated they are major players in the field. Currently, Inrix receives GPS feeds from more than a half million commercial vehicles across the country, he said.

Electronic toll collection (ETC) data comes to Inrix through agreements with toll authorities, but that’s a secondary source of information.

“We’ve found, in most cases, toll-tag information to be useful but not as highly accurate as GPS data that’s delivered straight off the vehicle,” Sedlik said.

To calculate speeds for vehicles with ETC tags, the toll authority must record the time a vehicle passes through a tollgate onto a “closed facility” such as a thruway, and again when it leaves the highway. Dividing the time elapsed by the number of miles crossed provides an average speed. But for a trip of many miles, that doesn’t indicate how fast the vehicle traveled on any particular segment. “There could be congestion in any number of those road segments that isn’t captured,” he said.

Data obtained from toll tags and GPS devices is “completely anonymous,” Sedlik said. “We do not provide to our customers a feed from a specific fleet. Our overall value is fusing data from multiple sources.”

The Dust Network is currently available in 35 markets, Sedlik said. Inrix plans to boost that number to 50 by the end of the year.

Circumnav Networks is another company focused on GPS devices as traffic probes. Circumnav plans to market onboard vehicle navigation systems that take current traffic conditions into consideration when they calculate routes for drivers. The navigation systems themselves provide the data used to derive roadway traffic speeds.

The company is “in stealth mode now, and we are not discussing our product or business plans,” wrote Steve Wollenberg, the company’s vice president of business development, in an e-mailed message. In November 2005, however, Circumnav worked with the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) to demonstrate its “dynamic route advisory navigation system” during the 12th World Congress on ITS, or intelligent transportation systems, in San Francisco.

“The service leverages an inexpensive in-vehicle navigation system (under $500) with GPS to self-generate optimized roadway traffic data from users as ‘floating car data’ probes,” says a description posted on the Web by California Partners for Advanced Transit and Highways (PATH) at the University of California, Berkeley. “The wireless service makes unique use of Wi-Fi 802.11b hardware and patent-pending software as a precursor to DSRC [Dedicated Short Range Communications] availability for occasional communications between vehicles and to Wi-Fi access points along the roadways, minimizing communications costs.”

The system supplements the probe data with travel times obtained from traffic information services.

On the East Coast, researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute also have experimented with GPS-based traffic probes. In the spring and summer of 2005, RPI’s Center for Infrastructure and Transportation Studies gave hand-held computers with integrated GPS and Sprint PCS communications to 200 volunteers, who kept them in their cars as they drove to and from work or school in the Troy, N.Y., area. The Federal Highway Administration and the New York State Department of Transportation funded the three-month test.

Each computer ran CoPilot, navigation software from ALK Technologies, which stored the default route a driver usually took to work. Every 30 seconds, the unit transmitted its location over the Sprint network to a server, where ALK software computed its speed.

“As you get more probes on the road, you get an average speed,” said William Wallace, the center’s director. If the software in the server detected a sudden drop in speed, indicating a traffic jam, it transmitted that information to the software in the hand-held computers, which then recalculated the route to avoid congestion and gave the driver audible directions for the new path.

RPI plans a follow-on project that will supplement the GPS data with data taken from ETC tags. Researchers will park trailers on the sides of certain non-toll roads, outfitted with detectors that read EZPass tags — the ones used on the New York State Thruway and many other highways in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic states.

“We’ll have a group of people who have the tags and a group of people who have the probes, and we’re going to analyze, if you had a combination of data, could you fuse it and, for example, have fewer probes,” Wallace said.

ALK Technologies hopes to commercialize the dynamic route guidance system; in fact, its CoPilot software has had the ability to revise routes based on traffic data from probes for almost five years, said Alain Kornhauser, the company’s chairman. But the market for this kind of system faces a chicken-and-egg dilemma, he said.

“It doesn’t really get good until you have a lot of probes out there, and you don’t have the probes out there before it gets good,” he said.

ALK could run the operations center for a dynamic route guidance system, Kornhauser said. But if a wireless carrier or other third party wants to take on that function, “We’re willing to partner with them or talk with them about it.”

Probably the biggest potential for such a system lies with commercial carriers, which could give their drivers mobile devices with CoPilot and run their own operations centers, Kornhauser said.

“Certainly for most commercial carriers, the smartphones they’re starting to carry around, the Motorola Q phone or the Treo or any of those things, are absolutely ideal for this,” he said.

While some companies are leveraging onboard GPS systems to gain traffic intelligence, the Sarasota County Area Transit (SCAT) system in Florida is looking at a secondary purpose for the devices. This fall, SCAT plans to release a request for proposals for a bus fleet management system that includes onboard GPS receivers. One reason SCAT needs to monitor bus locations is to comply with provisions of the Americans with Disabilities Act that require automated, audible stop announcements on buses. An AVL system also will automate the process of collecting some of the operations data that transit systems report to the federal government, and it will help dispatchers monitor the fleet. In addition, SCAT will use the data to tell waiting riders when the next bus will arrive.

That information will be available on any computer with access to the Web, including computers installed in kiosks at certain bus stops.

“The kiosks that we’re looking at putting in will be put at heavily used stops,” including transit hubs where riders transfer from one route to another, said Anthony Beckford, general manager for SCAT. Most likely, the kiosks will be linked to the Internet via a landline network.

The onboard systems will transmit location data to a server at SCAT’s operations center via a yet-to-be-chosen wireless technology. Vendors bidding on the system contract “will present us with a variety, and we’re going to look at whatever is best,” Beckford said.

SCAT is far from the first transit system to use onboard GPS devices to provide real-time bus arrival information. A company called NextBus, in Alameda, Calif., offers a system that processes AVL data to present bus-arrival information on the Web and on wireless devices. NextBus has installed the system, or won contracts to install it, in Chapel Hill, N.C., Rehoboth Beach, Del., San Francisco, Washington and other markets.