A Service Oriented Geoprocessing System for Real‐Time Road Traffic Monitoring

The emergence of the Sensor Web has paved the way for a new set of innovative software applications that exploit the enhanced availability of real‐time information. This article describes one such application built from Sensor Web components that aggregates GPS track data from a fleet of vehicles to provide an overview of road traffic congestion at the city scale. The application embodies a Service Oriented Architecture; web service components are used to archive and pre‐process incoming sensor observations, to encapsulate a horizontally partitioned spatial database that performs geoprocessing, and to disseminate results to client applications. Our results confirm that floating car data can provide an accurate depiction of current road traffic conditions. The presented solution uses Open Geospatial Consortium web services where possible and serves to highlight the difficulties inherent in achieving horizontal database scalability in sensor based geoprocessing systems.