IDEAL-TRAFFIC : a framework for building monitoring systems for intelligent transportation systems.

Abstract

The evolution and dissemination of network communication technology and the advanced status of embedded devices encourage the creation of solutions for monitoring cities in various environments. Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) is an area that makes use of these technologies, so that end-users can benefit from applications that deliver information in real time. On the other hand, administrating these applications is not a trivial task. Components may fail and invalidate an application. Usually, traffic application's architecture is centralized, fact that increases the cost of maintenance and reduces the flexibility of resources reuse. There are features required on ITS such as adaptability, scalability, heterogeneity, interoperability, openness, accessibility, and flexibility. It was not found on the literature any related work that aims to cover all these features, although some of them are requisites for ITS developed for use in North America and Europe. In this work we present IDEAL-TRAFFIC: a framework based on SOA architecture for building monitoring applications, with the ability to manage the state of the applications. IDEAL-TRAFFIC provides a simple interface that enables system administrators create applications and make them available to end-users. A self-adaptation process is included in the IDEAL-TRAFFIC framework in order to ensure fault tolerance. For the implementation of these features, rules of the application need to be considered and might depend upon the minimum of human intervention, since the framework can use third part systems or legacy systems to retrieve relevant data to continue running an application. In this thesis we have applied the IDEAL-TRAFFIC to two use cases to illustrate its use for ITS. In the first use case, we demonstrate the use of the framework in static nodes. In the second use case, we show how the framework may be integrated with vehicular networks. Three experiments have been launched. In all executions we reproduced the first use case over embedded devices. In order to demonstrate the framework accordance with the main ITS requirements, we illustrate the creation of services using XML SOA files, the communication among devices, the integration of the framework with a legacy system, and the scalability of the system. In all experiments we have obtained the expected results. This fact shows that the IDEAL-TRAFFIC is in accordance with the main ITS requirements. In the experiments launched, it was proved that the use of XML is an effective and efficient alternative, to create applications using services available by several nodes on the network. The proposed process reduces the time of creation of applications.