Towards a sustainable services ecosystem for traffic management

Abstract

Traffic management has been a major concern for cities around the world. However, despite traffic problems having a widespread impact in any city, alleviating it has primarily remained the city administrations concern. We argue that sustainable traffic management requires the creation of a services-based ecosystem mediated by city administration but open to businesses and citizens to contribute and benefit from. We illustrate such an eco-system using the case-study of acquiring traffic data by mining mobile phone usage of citizens, and discuss the business and technical considerations to implement it based on our experience in a city of developing country that has heterogeneous vehicles following chaotic patterns. © 2011 IEEE.