In a Nutshell
“SimpleFleet will be a one-stop solution for SMEs for tracking solutions and has as its ultimate goal the commoditization of tracking and fleet management services.”
The project SimpleFleet will make it easy for SMEs, both from a technological and business perspective, to create (mobile) web-based fleet management applications. In addition, SimpleFleet will also address the related geomarketing domain, which uses travel information in various geo-statistical analysis methods, as well as providing novel traffic data visualizations to be used in online and print publications.
Challenge
Fleet management solutions become important even for small SMEs operating only few vehicles, since they allow them to optimize their transportation tasks, minimize operating cost and maximize profit. Existing solutions however are too complex and too expensive.
Objectives
The key elements to effective transportation management are good data, good algorithms, and a simple setup. This is achieved by aggregating large amounts of traffic data streams in relation to map data providing fundamental data management and routing algorithms by delivering all this through a simple Web-based API and application framework for mobile and Web applications.
For this purpose, large amounts of Floating Car Data (FCD), essentially using tracking data generated by individual probe vehicles as samples to assess the overall traffic conditions (“cork swimming in the river”), will be used. The project will collect large amounts of traffic information from FCD live data feeds in Athens, Berlin, and Vienna (from a total of ~13.000 probe vehicles). They are complemented by historical datasets and speed profiles, whenever they are incomplete. Other used sources are data streams such as Traffic Message Channel (TMC) messages, or Open Street Map (OSM) tracking data.
Results
A data pool
- collecting and aggregating relevant tracking data
- deriving historic speed profiles
- assessing current (live) traffic conditions
- resulting in time-parameterized road networks
Dynamic services
- extending static location-based services (e.g., POIs) to services for the management of moving objects data, i.e., non-static objects that change their location over time
- providing high-quality and (very) low-cost fleet management solutions
TrafficFleet fleet management solutions for
- mobile phones (iFleet demonstrator) utilizing smartphones as sensors (GPS tracking)
Geomarketing
- Data analysis software that is based on the traffic data pool, for, e.g., the computation of catchment areas / isochrones
Traffic Visualization
- Data-driven visualizations suitable for online and print publications, e.g., traffic heat maps
