Intermodal Mobility Assistance for Megacities - Smart Information Systems: Computational Intelligence for Real-Life Applications - page 344

the sudden and unpredictable occurrences of high congestion. Contemporary solu-
tions are not able to account for such incidents. On the contrary, the IMA system
integrates live traffic data from three categories of sources in order to account for
this particular problem. These sources are as follows: First, data from on-board units,
deployed on selected vehicles, is considered. These on-board units provide real-time
data about the current traffic flow at selected locations. Second, video channels are
analyzed in real-time. The gathered information is directly forwarded to the IMA
system and included in the route computation. Finally, traffic data coming from an
online platform, namely Microsoft Bing , is being used.
IMA seamlessly integrates these three channels and uses their information for the
route computation process. Given a certain quality of input data, the resulting routes
are highly precise and reflect the current traffic situation much better than available
solutions.
For monitoring purposes, the IMA system provides a graphical user front-end,
which interactively shows the current traffic situation on an animated map.
IMA routing was implemented within two distinct JIAC agents with access to
external services, in compliance with the agent paradigm. In addition, in confor-
mity with the philosophy of JIAC, fundamental agent-functionality was implemented
within encapsulated and reusable AgentBeans. The entire system comprises the fol-
lowing components:

• The OSM Routing Agent

- The Plain Routing Bean
- The Real-time Traffic Bean

• The Video-Analysis-Agent

• External Traffic Services

The Plain Routing Bean represents the core of the IMA routing system and pro-
vides several capabilities to find appropriate routes through the city, utilizing the
underlying topology. In order to compute routes that reflect the current traffic situ-
ation, the Plain Routing Bean uses information which is provided by the Real-time
Traffic Bean.
The Real-time Traffic Bean receives and processes traffic data from connected
input channels. Information related to traffic incidents is stored in a volatile fashion
in order to reflect the dynamic nature of traffic environments. Available information,
however, is directly used for the route computation, such that the resulting routes are
tailored to the current traffic situation. Traffic-related data is also forwarded to the
graphical user interface of the IMA application, which visually displays the current
state of the managed traffic system. Combined together, the Plain Routing Bean and
the Real-time Traffic Bean form the OSM Routing Agent .
The second agent in our system is the Video-Analysis-Agent . This agent comprises
only one AgentBean. The Video Analysis Agent analyzes video streams from traffic
surveillance cameras located at busy main roads in the city. The data gathered from
this analysis gives some indication of the traffic situation at this specific road. This