Floating Vehicle Data system - realisation of a commercial system

This paper describes how Mott MacDonald have developed on behalf of iTIS a Floating Vehicle Data system (FVD/spl trade/) which utilises instrumented vehicles to gather information on the traffic conditions on the UK major road network. iTIS offer the FVD/spl trade/ information gathered via a number of commercial traffic related services. In order to achieve commercial success iTIS and Mott MacDonald have worked together to implement techniques which optimise the selection of likely vehicles requested to report live position and speed, minimise vehicle reporting communications costs, maximise the value of returned vehicle positions in matching to roads on the UK network, and maximise the speed of spatial analysis algorithms to cater for the data rates required to achieve commercial operation. The system has evolved (software and hardware) to support commercial level operations and currently has greater than 11,000 live probes (with plans to increase this number in the near future) and a data throughput exceeding 0.5 million vehicle positions per hour on a failover redundant hardware platform.