Floating car data communication
A very interesting developing technology in ITS uses mobile or cell phones. Most
vehicles contain one or more cell phones. These cell phones routinely transmit their
location information to the network – even when no voice connection is established.
So cell phones in vehicles can be used as ‘anonymous’ traffic probes.
As the car moves, so does the signal of the mobile phone. By measuring and analyzing ‘triangulation’ network data, the data may be converted into accurate traffic flow information. The more congestion, the more vehicles, the more cell phones and thus more probes. In metropolitan areas the distance between vehicles is shorter, so accuracy increases. With this interesting technology, no infrastructure is needed along the road. Cell phones do the job.
In summary, floating car data technology provides great advantages over existing methods
of traffic measurement:
• Much less expensive than sensors or cameras
• More coverage: all locations and streets
• Faster to set up (no work zones)
• Less maintenance
• Works in all weather conditions, including heavy rain
Infrastructure sensing technologies
Another interesting development in the world of ITS is Infrastructure sensing technologies.
These are sensors that are installed or embedded on the road, or surrounding the road
(buildings, posts, and signs for example).
These sensing devices may be installed during preventive road maintenance, or by sensor injection machinery.
Inductive loops can be placed in a roadbed to detect vehicles as they pass over the loop by measuring the vehicle's magnetic field. The simplest detectors simply count the number of vehicles during a unit of time (typically 60 seconds in the United States) that pass over the loop, while more sophisticated sensors estimate the speed, length and weight of vehicles and the distance between them. Loops can be placed in a single lane or across multiple lanes, and they work with very slow or stopped vehicles as well as with vehicles moving at high-speed.
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