Addressing Mobility Challenges in Transportation Using Spatial Analysis

The German Aerospace Center (DLR), Germany's national aeronautics research centre, includes an Institute of Transportation Systems that focuses on ground-based transportation research, such as urban and rural mobility, traffic management, and next generation vehicles. We use Oracle Database spatial features to store and analyze high volumes of infrastructure, vehicle and passenger data. This data also supports applications such as routing, multi-model traffic management, HD maps for vehicle assistance. In a mobility use case, we track data from travelers' smartphones, sent to a central database for analysis. We try to detect which transportation mode the traveler is using, with an algorithm. Movements of a bus, tram or a car in dense city traffic can be very similar. Similar, previously validated trips by users inform the analysis. Trip segments are compared using Oracle spatial analytics functions, which handle high volume spatial processing. We will share the challenges and solutions.