Social Physics Techniques for Meeting ITS Deployment Challenges in Cities of Emerging Economies

Intelligent transportation systems (ITS) use information technology to improve the safety and efficiency of surface transportation mobility. Emerging cities that are still in the early phases of infrastructure deployment have an opportunity to leapfrog directly to ITS applications that have already been proven to be successful elsewhere. One challenge, however, is lack of availability of real-time traffic data, which are important for the planning and monitoring of most ITS applications in these developing cities. This paper describes how data collected from mobile phones and analysis techniques from the new field of social physics—which is defined as the modeling of human behavior through aggregation of big data—could be used to respond to this challenging lack of useful data. Few studies have indicated that use of cell phone data and application of social physics might help overcome the lack of data obstacle to ITS deployment in cities of emerging economies. Although further study is needed, widespread cell phone usage and the corresponding GPS data suggest other emerging cities may benefit from similar approaches. This paper discusses the potential of integrating cell phone data with social physics for providing the real-time traffic data for ITS applications in cities that would benefit from it the most.