Real-Time and Historical Traveler Information for Routing and Trip Advice

As travelers waste numerous hours yearly on congested highways, there is an increasing need for highly-reliable and actionable traffic/traveler information to take mitigating action and avoid congestion. We describe a scalable system for producing an aggregated, unified datasource and a set of services geared towards satisfying this need. Our system named BeatTheTraffic.com aggregates in real-time quality data from 11 heterogeneous datasources USA-wide, representing a population coverage of about 61 million (19 cities), qualifies the data, and adds value by personalizing the data, proving routing and re-routing capabilities, and providing trip planning information. This system was developed after collecting feedback from travelers seeking traffic advisory information on two Internet websites[1]. This study revealed that travelers were particularly interested in trip time and alternate routes, and in a system that would remember their preferences. The study also indicated that travelers would be willing to pay a subscription fee for such a service. Moving forward on this assumption, which was corroborated in academia[2], a system was built centered around the capability of providing routing. Personalization thus means that a user’s request for information will invoke a series of fairly complex on-the-fly computations going beyond publishing the same information for everyone: routing (based on shortest time or shortest distance), personalized map drawing, etc. This paper describes the main characteristics and components of BeatTheTraffic.com, running on a modern PC server equipped with dual CPU as well as a RAID configuration and sufficient memory.