Newsletter

Mining large amounts of traffic data to find the measurements or raw GPS points related to a single corridor, or connecting two gates, may be both cumbersome and time consuming - unless you use the Corridor Travel Times™ tool from Hermes Traffic Intelligence. This expert tool lets you describe the corridors you are interested in, perform the necessary data queries, and presents the results to you, e.g. in a customized spreadsheet.

The tool consists of four parts:

• A web-based user interface (the Corridor Tool), that will allow you to describe the corridors on a map. The description is accompanied with a number of settings, indicating e.g. the period you are interested in, the type of days, or the vehicle type. Your description, known as a job, may be stored locally, and can be re-used a number of times with different settings.
• The job manager (called HTI Engine), which is contacted when a job is submitted via the user interface. Since it may take several hours to perform the queries associated with a job, the job manager controls new jobs when they arrive, and make sure to execute them in the correct order. If need be, the manager can be configured to have e.g. multiple queues for jobs with different priorities or estimated run-times.
• The query engine (called Trip Validator) that will perform queries on the raw data based on the corridor definitions in the current job. When querying raw GPS data, data may be accessible through a database interface or simply by having data stored in text-based files. The query engine may be configured to lookup data in various formats.
• The spreadsheet generator (called Report Generator) which will transform the results from the query engine to a spreadsheet, including formulas and charts. The spreadsheet generated may be opened with MS Excel™.

For strategy and science

The tool has mainly been applied to strategic and scientific purposes. Within traffic strategy the applications have been ranging from measurements on turning times in intersections to speed profiles for longer stretches during the day. Scientific applications have mainly been to investigate the differences between datasets describing travel in the same area and time period but in different ways.

Your dataset may be next

If you have collected point-based GPS data from vehicles for a while, and you would like to apply the Corridor Travel Times™ tool, an email to info@hermestraffic.com is your next step. The tool can be customized to handle GPS data in your format, database or text-based, as long as each point is described using a well-known coordinates system, gives a (possibly temporary) identification of the vehicle delivering the points, and has a timestamp. If you would like a customized spreadsheet as a result, this can be done as well.