2016 Intl. Conference on Advances in Computing, Communications and Informatics (ICACCI), Sept.
21-24, 2016, Jaipur, India
Strategies to Handle Big Data for Traffic
Management in Smart Cities
Satyanarayana V Nandury1,2
1- Academy of Scientific & Innovative Research
2- CSIR-Indian Institute of Chemical Technology
Hyderabad, India
satyanarayana.v.nandury@ieee.org
AbstractThe myriad sensors deployed across a smart city,
serve as major source for Big data, which can potentially be used
for various applications like smart governance, smart energy,
smart traffic, smart environment, etc. However, issues related to
the handling of such huge volumes of data originating from
thousands of heterogeneous sensor and IoT devices placed across
the length and breadth of the city, emerge as a major challenge.
While it may be relatively easy to identify the IT devices necessary
for processing Big data, in the absence of clear strategies and
robust platform architecture for handling Big data, the deployment
of these resources attain limited success. The SWIFT architecture
introduced by us in an earlier work provides a ubiquitous platform
for seamless interaction of various smart objects, devices and
systems, and hence may prove to be an ideal architecture to
capture, process and assimilate information from Big data. In this
paper we discuss issues related to implementation of SWIFT
architecture for handling Big data for traffic management in smart
cities. Various strategies to provide Big data solutions for smart
traffic in terms of profiling traffic density, traffic signaling,
managing the parking lots, smart navigation and monitoring
vehicular pollution are discussed in the paper.
KeywordsBig data; context; smart cites; SWIFT architecture;
WSN
I. INTRODUCTION
Due to better lifestyle and employment opportunities, the
cities have become an attractive place for living, and the world is
witnessing an increasing trend of rural folk moving over to cities.
As per a recent study, about 60% of the global population is
expected to live in cities by 2025 [1]. The cities world over, need
to emerge as smart cities to meet this massive influx of rural
masses into urban areas. To meet the infrastructure and socio-
economic requirements of smart cities, the National Smart Cities
mission of India has earmarked a budget of $160 billion for the
next five years to develop 100 smart cities across the country [2].
The ever increasing demand for providing better living
conditions in smart cities, has forced the civil authorities to
address issues related to the triple bottom line for sustainable
development in smart cities [2], [3], viz. economic prosperity,
environment integrity and social equity. Since, smart and optimal
utilization of resources being a key ingredient for any attempt
toward achieving sustainable development, the resources need to
978-1-5090-2029-4/16/$31.00 @2016 IEEE
Beneyaz A Begum1,2
1- Academy of Scientific & Innovative Research
2- CSIR-Indian Institute of Chemical Technology
Hyderabad, India
beneyaz.cet@gmail.com
be closely monitored. To ensure their optimization, smart cities
need to deploy thousands of wireless sensors and actuators across
the city to monitor various phenomena and to control & audit the
usage of scarce resources.
The myriad sensors and actuators, however, keep generating
huge amounts of data every second. Sitting on mounds of
untapped data, smart cities are likely to encounter the herculean
challenge of mining credible information from data being
generated across the smart city. However, to handle such
voluminous amounts data, the traditional data processing
approaches may not be adequate. To get over this issue, we
introduce concepts of Big data analytics for processing Big data
generated in smart cities for its potential application in various
fields like smart infrastructure, smart environment, smart power
& energy, smart traffic, smart health services, smart waste, etc.
To illustrate the use of these concepts, we propose few strategies
to handle Big data for smart traffic management in smart cities.
Traffic congestion and delays in travel is a serious problem in
urban locales. A congested route often leads other problems such
as longer waiting times, wastage of fuel, air and noise pollution,
etc. Prerequisite for cities to have smart traffic management is a
smart ICT infrastructure that is open, platform independent and
can handle real-time Big data. To facilitate seamless connectivity
of various heterogeneous sensors, actuators, and computing
platforms, a robust IT backbone infrastructure needs to be
created. To handle Big data and to meet challenges in providing
QoS to a host of services, the foremost requirement for smart
cities is the IT infrastructure that is pervasive to cover the entire
city; ubiquitous to provide 24x7 services; reliable to tolerate
faults and provide QoS; flexible to platform different types of
devices & systems; scalable to accommodate city expansion;
adaptable to embrace newer technologies, regulations and
policies; and more importantly, versatile to handle the vagaries of
human kind and their never ending quest for better living
conditions. To this end, we have proposed a platform architecture
named Smart WSN-based Infrastructural Framework for smart
Transactions (SWIFT) for smart cities in [3]. We discuss the
application of SWIFT architecture for handling Big data for
smart traffic applications in smart cities.
The rest of the work is organized as follows: In Section II, we
present an overview of global market for Big Data, available
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 2016 Intl. Conference on Advances in Computing, Communications and Informatics (ICACCI), Sept. 21-24, 2016, Jaipur, India
platform & computing tools to handle Big data, their limitations;
smart city and its challenges; and reviews related works on smart
traffic monitoring. In Section III, we present the requirements for
smart traffic management in smart cities. The challenges likely to
be encountered while applying Big data for smart traffic
applications are discussed in Section IV. In Section V, we discuss
the role of context-based Big data in smart traffic management
and propose few strategies to handle Big data for smart traffic
applications. The application of SWIFT architecture for utilizing
context based Big data for smart traffic is presented in Section
VI.
II. BACKGROUND LITERATURE
A city may be called smart when investments in human &
social capital and modern information & communication
infrastructure, fuel sustainable economic growth for better quality
of life, through smart management of natural resources and
participatory governance [4]. This ICT revolution which fueled
the growth of smart cities, allows unprecedented generation of
data, while at the same time providing ubiquitous public access to
information. The Global smart city market is poised to grow at
more than 14%, and is expected to reach over $1.3 trillion by
2019 [5].
As digitization has become an integral part of social life, it is
estimated that about 90% of the worlds digitized data was
captured over just the past two years [6]. This has driven many
governments and R&D organizations to utilize Big data
technology to support the development and sustainability of
smart cities [7].
Big Data is not only large, but much unstructured, complex,
heterogeneous, composed of various data types streaming data
and may be even ambiguous, noisy or erroneous, which may
have negative impact on the statistical and data analysis
techniques and may degrade the accuracy of the mining results.
Conventional data analytic algorithms can be applied for analysis
of Big data based on the specific application domain (e.g.,
clustering algorithms such as BIRCH [8], classification
algorithms such as k-nearest neighbor, linear and quadratic
discriminant analysis, Naive Bayes, support vector machine and
artificial neural network).
Big data is an essential component of smart cities applications
as massive data generated from smart sensors, Internet of Things
(IoT), crowd sourced data; can be used by organizations and
government to provide smart solutions to smart city dwellers. Big
data can be characterized by three key features (3-Vs): volume,
velocity and variety [9], [10]. Volume refers to the size of data
that has been generated from multiple sources. Velocity means
the speed at which data is generated, stored, analyzed and
processed. Variety refers to the different types of data being
generated. As most data generated is unstructured it cannot be
easily categorized or tabulated. In addition features like
variability and value are needed to present a complete definition:
[11], [12]. Variability defines how the structure and meaning of
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data changes constantly, while Value refers to the core
information that needs to be retrieved from big data.
Some key challenges that any government and city planners
might encounter while implementing smart city strategies are:
integration/collaboration between different organizations and
application services, the openness of organizations for sharing
information resources to ensure data accuracy, security, support
for good ICT infrastructure, different smart city solutions,
multiple technologies participation of people, etc. With advanced
Big data solutions and ICT infrastructure such challenges could
be transformed into opportunities (better resource utilization,
better quality of life, information transparency and usage).
Data can be acquired from multiple data generating sources
like digitized city, its citizens through use of smartphones, smart
devices, computers, internet, ubiquitous sensing, cameras, RFID
devices, WSNs, GIS map, crowdsourcing, etc. However, the size,
complexity, quality and diversity of these collected data impose
complexities in storage, retrieval and analysis of data, since the
existing standard statistical techniques, or mining tools have
limited capability to process Big data. Reports from the business
world reveal that effective analysis and utilization of big data can
help organizations out-perform their competitors [13], [14]. To
harness information from such large volumes of unstructured
data, Big data solutions have emerged that significantly lowered
the cost mining customized information from unstructured data.
The SWIFT architecture proposed by us in [3] provides an
architectural framework that supports integration of
heterogeneous devices, IoT components and technologies to
facilitate seamless flow of information and can readily be tuned
for Big data applications. In this work, we discuss the application
of SWIFT architecture for handling Big data for smart traffic
management.
SWIFT is a three-tiered architecture, with Smart Wireless
Sensor Network (S-WSN) layer forming the base. The second
layer Smart Wireless-based Pervasive Edifice (SWIPE),
resides on the S-WSN layer. The third is the apex layer, Smart
Decision & Control Enabler (SDCE). A schematic of SWIFT
architecture is shown in Fig. 1.
The S-WSN layer acts as the sensory organ of the SWIFT
architecture. The layer consists of several hundreds of physically
dispersed wireless sensor nodes that sense a phenomenon of
interest and report the data for further analysis. Smart Cluster
Heads (SCHs) are deployed at various locations in the city to
collect and aggregate data from nearby sensor nodes. Such
deployment facilitates acquisition of real-time data related to
various physical and social phenomena and paves a way to create
contextual information. In addition to sensed data, the nodes
transmit their node ID and battery status to the SCH. The SCHs
are capable of taking low-end, but nevertheless important
decisions like raising an alarm, generating emergency actuation
signals etc. After aggregating and processing the data, the SCHs
transmit the information to nearby Smart Fusion Nodes (SFN) in
the SWIPE layer.
 2016 Intl. Conference on Advances in Computing, Communications and Informatics (ICACCI), Sept. 21-24, 2016, Jaipur, India
Fig. 1. SWIFT Architecture.
SWIPE is the heart of SWIFT architecture, which comprises
several Smart Fusion Nodes (SFN) that acts as the edifice for
SWIFT architecture. SFNs act as data classifiers and perform
data fusion to draw meaningful interpretation of the sensed data
for query processing and other related services. They collect
information from S-WSN layer to facilitate ubiquitous
computing. Smart Decision & Control Enabler (SDCE) is the
apex layer that provides a host of services (cloud) to all smart
objects in the city based on data provided by SWIPE. The
architecture is modeled to provide IT infrastructure that is
pervasive, ubiquitous, reliable, flexible, scalable, adaptable and
versatile.
III. REQUIREMENTS FOR SMART TRAFFIC MANAGEMENT
The most essential requirements for smart traffic management
system are:
Effective traffic monitoring and control system
Data Collection agents
Robust ICT infrastructure and ubiquitous computing
platforms
Big data Sources
A. Traffic Monitoring & Control Devices and Systems
Foremost amongst the requirements for smart traffic
management is the infrastructure necessary for effective and
robust traffic monitoring. Meaningful information obtained from
various sensors deployed across the city for traffic monitoring
help in devising systems that i) reduce travel time, ii) avoid
traffic congestion for smooth the traffic flow, iii) prevent
accidents, iv) guiding travelers to routes which are less
congested, v) identifying parking slots, vi) clearing routes for
emergency vehicles, and vii) control traffic signal cycles.
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B. Data Collection Agents
Collection of information is vital for implementing an
effective traffic management and control system. The sensors and
actuators necessary to sense and control traffic must be robust
enough to continue to perform well under widely varying
weather & climatic conditions all through the year. The
information collecting devices can be either static or mobile. Few
such collection devices are listed below:
a) Wireless Sensor Network (WSN): A WSN consists of
large number of sensors and/or actuators deployed in region of
interest (ROI) to collect data depending on the application
requirement. For the design of the network, the nature of the
environment where the nodes are deployed must take into
account the objectives of specific applications. Smart sensors
perceive ambient physical parameters, process information and
transmit the data signal to the nearby access points.
Heterogeneous sensors can be integrated in a single device or
deployed on both sides of road for sensing road conditions and
traffic.
b) Interet of Things (IoT): Besides sensors, IoT can also
be utilized to record the events. It is an information network that
connects devices, smart devices, RFID readers, to the internet
via Wi-Fi, and other advanced wireless technologies. IoT allows
ubiquiotous access to information collected on different
technologies platforms (e.g. sensors and sensor networks, cloud,
data modeling, storing, processing, reasoning, ICT) [15].
c) Video Surveillance: It enables the capture of real-time
images/videos of the incidents and passerby on the road.
d) Satellite system: It provides GIS map/aerial
photographs of the road network in a city. Vehicles equipped
with GPS can be guided to less congested routes.
e) Meteorological sensors: Metereological information
helps vehicle owners plan their visits to various places during
the day. They can avoid venturing out during rain or when it is
likely to snow.
f) Traffic control centres: The control centers collect
information of vehicular movement in different zones in the city
and broadcast alert messages through various media like FM
radio, SMS, mails and socila media to its subscribers.
g) Mobile Infrastructure: It includes probe vehicles (GPS-
enabled vehicles) and portable devices (such as smartphones)
that use localization systems for sensing their position
(timestamp, latitude, longitude) and speed, and wireless
terminals to allow sharing of the sensed data. Smartphones and
GPS-enabled vehicles (crowdsourcing) can provide location and
velocity estimates using the GPS sensor.
C. ICT Infrastructure and Ubiquiotous Computing Platform
To handle the Big data and the complexities involved in its
processing, a suitable computing platform is required. The
computing platform need to consider data heterogeneity, time to
produce the results, processing load and training and
 2016 Intl. Conference on Advances in Computing, Communications and Informatics (ICACCI), Sept. 21-24, 2016, Jaipur, India

implementation of different models (traffic model, road model, information based on GIS map, and to overlap them to
weather model, etc.) The ICT infrastructure must ensure accurate, retrieve information related to traffic congestion.
timely and reliable delivery of data from road traffic monitoring
systems. To allow direct communication between the monitoring Non-experimental automated vehicle location (AVL):
infrastructure (sensors, etc.) and traffic-related services, radio AVL systems which use GPS to collect probe data tend to
communication can be used based on advanced wireless be sparse compared to other systems that typically record
technology (WiFi, 3G, 4G, WLAN, Bluetooth, EDGE, LTE, samples once every 20 or 30 seconds. Therefore,
WiMAX, etc.). techniques developed for higher sampling rates are not
directly applicable. Such sparse data can be modeled
D. Big data sources using Hidden Markov Model for analysis of travel time
One of the recent technologies that has huge potential to distributions.
enhance smart city services is big data analytics and context
TABLE I. DIFFERENT DATA SOURCES AND ITS PURPOSE
tagging. The primary role of big data in cities is to facilitate
assimilation of information from multiple flows. To understand Sensors/data Data Generated Application
the traffic flow trend/pattern, travel time and congestion, Big data Sources
appears to be a major solution to smart traffic monitoring system. Magnetic Loops Act as counters, counting vehicle Detect
passing over them. Some variants vehicle
Table I presents various sensors/data sources that collect Big
are used to classify vehicles.
data, the type of data that they generate and their applications. Inductive Loops Detect vehicle passage and Detect
Present day governments are adopting the smart city concept in presence. vehicle
their cities and implementing big data applications that support Laser-based radars Provide vehicle presence at traffic
smart city services to reach the required level of sustainability signals, volume, speed, length
and improve the living standards & mechanisms of learning, and assessment, queue measurement,
and classification.
coordination by heterogeneous individuals [14].
Infra-red detectors Detect vehicle passage or presence
Ultrasonic detectors Measuring the time taken for the
IV. BIG DATA APPLICATION CHALLENGES
sound echo to return the distance of
In the context of smart city traffic monitoring, we discuss an object can be found. Ultrasonic
below the challenges for real-time traffic monitoring and in Doppler detector that also measures
vehicle speed.
implementing data analytics.
Microwave radar Traffic volume, speed, and vehicle Calculation
Traffic behavior varies from location to location and the trend detectors length. of traffic
data
is non-linear, and is affected by several factors, such as, traffic
Anisotropic Count stationary or moving vehicle Count and
volume, weather, traffic signal, road occupancy, vehicle size, etc. Magneto-resistive in particular lane. Classify vehicle detect
Traffic flows in urban road networks are highly variable across (AMR)/Magnetic vehicles
different network links and different times of day. Therefore, Sensors
area-wise traffic data collection is necessary. Some of the Acoustic sensors measure vehicle passage, presence vehicle
challenges posed by existing methods are briefly discussed and speed by detecting sounds count
produced by vehicular traffic
below:
Satellite systems GIS map of road network.
Tracking of GPS Data: One of the popular methods to GPS-based systems GPS-derived location information is Localization
(smartphone, used to track movement of vehicles information.
track moving object is the linear interpolation method, vehicle) (speed) and report this information
which is effective when the velocity of the vehicle to a server.
between sampling points is constant. However, if the Camera-based Detect, count and classify vehicles. Vehicle
vehicles accelerate and decelerate frequently, which is systems passage,
quite normal, deciphering the Big data generated by the presence,
GPS at various sampling units is a major challenge. speed can be
extracted by
Dispersion method cannot model road geometry, road image
occupancy and complex traffic flows. Under such traffic processing
flows, neural nets and other learning algorithms that rely Temperature and Temperature and relative humidity Weather
on Big data could succeed in determining solutions for humidity sensors
complex non-linear problems. Accelerometers sensing structural damages of
bridges and pavement
Crowd sensing using GPS enable navigation systems: Sound level sound level (dB) in a traffic area
GPS-equipped mobile phone/vehicles data can be affected meters/microphones
by many factors, for example, the errors in transmitting Pollutant detectors CO, PM2.5, CO2, NO2 AQI
GPS signal, the electromagnetic interference, etc. One
way to deal with this problem, is to combine the
positional information of GPS data and the road

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 2016 Intl. Conference on Advances in Computing, Communications and Informatics (ICACCI), Sept. 21-24, 2016, Jaipur, India
TABLE II. CONTEXTUAL ENTITY AND THEIR ATTRIBUTES FOR SMART TRAFFIC MONITORING SYSTEM
Entity Features
Number of lanes, maximum speed limit,
road type, one/two-way, road segment
Road state
geometry, intersection points, type of road
surface.
speed, flow and vehicle counts
Traffic state
(occupancy) in short time intervals.
Temperature (Temp), relative humidity
Weather Data (RH), air pressure and density, wind speed
and direction, sunny, Rain.
Daytime TW1, TW2, TW24
stationary, moving: low-speed, normal
Vehicle mobility
speed
Human Mobility Latitude, longitude, speed
Street Lights Foggy-F, Cloudy-C
Color of signal: green, orange, red and
Traffic Signal dirction of flow: left, right, forward,
average waiting time
Air Concentration of CO, PM2.5, CO2, NO2
Sound level at different hours: Daily
Noise equivalent sound levels(LeqD), LA10 and
LA90, LAeq, Lden, Lday, Lnight,
Location information is used to estimate
Crowdsourcing speed of vehicle and helps in identifying
anomalous traffic situations.
S: Spatial Classifier and T: Temporal Classifier.
V. CHALLENGES TO HANDLE BIG DATA AND STRATEGIES TO
PROVIDE BIG DATA SOLUTION FOR SMART TRAFFIC
We can infer real-time and fine-grained traffic behavior
information of entire city using Big data generated from
heterogeneous sources. Big data analytics can help understand
the traffic pattern and thereby identifying the root cause of
congestion on roads. The analytics can also be used in
forecasting/predicting congestions and can give alerts on roads,
route selection based on congestion data. With an estimate of
traffic density and travel time, real-time traffic information
along with historical traffic data, can alleviate the congestion
problem. In this section, we briefly outline the difficulties in
handling heterogeneous data and propose strategies to handle
the Big Data generated from traffic monitoring data generators
and use context-based machine learning and reasoning to
perform real-time data analytics on the big data. Some of the
challenges in handling Big data are listed below:
Identification of features from each kind of data source.
Integrating multiple heterogeneous data sources into a
learning model (semi-supervised learning models such
as co-training and tri-training models [16], [17-18],
[19]).
Classifier Inference/
Reasoning
S Possibility of congestion and propagation of congestion.
T Traffic state (traffic density) is mapped to congestion level
Temp = C, RH; high( air pressure+ temp+ density)= Cloudy,
low( air pressure+ temp+ density)= clear sky; wind direction;
Sunshine and UV intensity level; Rain: Tr = trace (< 0.1 mm.),
S
Sl = slight rain ( 0.1 10.0 mm), M = moderate rain (10.1 - 35.0
mm), H = heavy rain (35.1 90.0 mm), VH = very heavy rain (
> 90.1 mm )
T 24 hour can be divided into Time window of 1 hour each.
Driving condition, free-flowing traffic causes less acceleration
T and deceleration and consequently impacts the noise emitted by
the engine.
T Infer users location based on moving cell phone
T Intelligent lighting in foggy or cloudy weather
As queue length is proportional to traffic volume, and road
width is proportionality constant, tuning traffic signals
T
proportional to waiting traffic volumes, queue lengths can help
to over traffic flow.
S AQI of the area
S 70dB busy traffic.
S and T
Establish correlation between traffic congestion and vehicles
speed
halting at a traffic signal.
distribution
Spatially-related data: location of interest, road
network, weather (cloudy, rainy, sunny)
Temporally-related data: traffic, human mobility, traffic
signal, day/night.
Data sparseness: Many locations to infer; limited
number of traffic monitoring stations on road segments.
To get over the challenges, context driven Big data
analytics need to be adopted for smart traffic. They are briefly
enumerated below. A semi-supervised learning model that
makes use of the analytics is also discussed in this Section.
A. Role of Context-based Analytics on Real-Time Traffic
Data
Context is a critical component of analytic decision
process. Context is any information derived from data
observations about entities (e.g., person, place, or object)
depending on the interaction between an entity and an
application. Schilit et al. [20] define three aspects of context:
where, who, and what. The definition of context constantly
changes with the change in execution environment, i.e.,
computing environment (available processors, devices
accessible for user input and display, network capacity,
connectivity, and costs of computing); user environment
(location, collection of nearby people, and social situation); and
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physical environment (such as lighting and noise level). By
using context analytics with big data, high quality data models
can be developed and implemented to derive trends, patterns,
and relationships from unstructured data and related structured
road traffic data. Contextual data can be used to provide better
decisions. Integrating context with Big data analytics could
assist in detecting relationship between related entities across
large, sparse, and unrelated collections of historic and current
data. Table II, provides an idea about the contextual entity and
theirs attributes for smart traffic monitoring system. These
contextual entities can be used to develop different data models
for training and reasoning.
B. Strategies to handle Big data
Divide the city into disjoint road segments (grid).
Extract features of each road segment: The road
segment features include road map geometry, number
of lanes, one way or two way, entry and exit points on
road segments, traffic signal points, length of route on
either side of road segment, number of intersection
points that affect the location, vehicle
density/occupancy, average speed of the traffic on the
lane, etc.
Extract Traffic features: The traffic features include,
traffic flow, normal speed, low-speed; direction of
movement of traffic (left, right, forward), distribution of
vehicle speed with time, expected speed to cover the
lane, standard deviation from the expected speed, traffic
signaling time, average waiting time, number of signal
cycles to allow a vehicle to pass.
Extract vehicle features: Type of vehicle; average
velocity of vehicle of same type
Extract meteorological features: Weather- rainy,
cloudy, sunny, foggy.
Extract human mobility features: ID of cellphone tower
where the calls are being handled (cellular phone as
mobile sensors), rough estimate of users location
(latitude, longitude) and traffic information.
Extract time features: Daytime- morning, afternoon,
evening, night; peak time and off-time; divide time into
24 hours window.
Apply co-training semi-supervised learning model [17],
[18], for each factor affecting the traffic behavior:
Predict traffic congestion with sparse data sets, use of
time and spatial related features.
C. Supervised Learning Model
The supervised learning model comprises the following:
State of traffic pattern- temporal correlation in a route,
geo-correlation between two routes
Predict traffic congestion of a route
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Fig. 2. Training process of classifier using Big data.
Possibility of congestion propagation to other routes
Extract temporal features (traffic flow, weather, day,
human mobility, vehicle mobility) and spatially related
features (road networks, location of interest).
One of the main steps involved tuning the learning
behavior of the model is Co-training. Co-training is a machine
learning algorithm used when there are only small amounts of
labeled data and large amounts of unlabeled data
(audio/acoustic, videos) available [17],[18]. It is a semi-
supervised learning technique that requires two views of the
data, i.e., two different conditionally independent feature sets
that provide different, complementary information about the
instance and each view is sufficient to accurately predict the
instance. Co-training provides a better inference if one of the
classifiers correctly labels a piece of data that the other
classifier previously misclassified. The choice of an algorithm
is based on the specific application domain.
a) Temporal classifier (T)- It models traffic pattern of a
location/route using temporally related features based on
Chain Conditional Random Field (CRF) [17].
b) Spatial classifier (S)- It models spatial correlation of
traffic pattern between two congested routes of different
locations using Back Propagation network or RBF (Radial
Basis Function).
First, the two classifiers (S and T) are trained with two
separated sets of features independently on labeled data sets
and then train each other on unlabeled data. The trained sets are
then used to infer unlabeled road segments iteratively. The
trained data defines the inference rules that can serve as a
knowledge base for performing data fusion operations and
drawing inference from the output as shown in Fig. 2.
During inference stage, both the trained sets are applied to
the corresponding features separately, to determine the traffic
pattern of a route/road segment by taking into account the
probability scores of both classifiers. We can use the route
selection function (decision-making) to assist drivers for
smooth travel services. Similarly, based on the number of
vehicles and pedestrian, traffic signaling can be controlled to
organize traffic flow.
 2016 Intl. Conference on Advances in Computing, Communications and Informatics (ICACCI), Sept. 21-24, 2016, Jaipur, India
VI. APPLICATION OF SWIFT ARCHITECTURE FOR HANDLING BIG
DATA FOR SMART TRAFFIC
This section discusses the implementation of SWIFT
architecture in providing Big data solution for smart traffic
management in smart cities. The entire process of big data
solution for smart traffic can be divided into following steps:
Deployment of event monitoring/sensing devices
Data collection from different data sources/generators
as illustrated in Fig. 3.
Preprocessing: data interpretation and context analysis
Processing of data stream and execution of data
analytics (online)
Data storage
Data analytics (offline)
We briefly describe the data flow and data handling
strategies in each layer of SWIFT.
A. Smart WSN Layer
For freeway environments, static infrastructure is suitable
but for urban road networks where the traffic is highly variable
across different network segments and different times of day an
area-wise traffic data collection is required. For collecting
location-specific, temporal traffic data from different sources,
the entire road network of a city can be divided into disjoint
segments. Each segment of the road is supposed to have
structured lane with lane discipline for the vehicles. The S-
WSN is the sensory layer formed by SCHs acting as data
Fig. 3. Big data sources for road traffic monitoring.
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segments, which report data at regular intervals. The road
segments have one/more SCH(s), mounted on overhead
collecting platform or point of access and traffic monitoring
sensors. The sensors are deployed on both sides of the road
positions such as traffic posts or lampposts, depending on the
length of the road and whether the road is one or two-way. The
location and application-specific SCHs aggregates data from
all traffic monitoring devices and send the traffic state
information to the nearby SFN.
The important function of the SCH is to perform context
tagging on raw data (data transformation) collected from the
sensors and conduct statistical analysis to determine their status
and lifetime, and generate alerts to take action against faulty
nodes. The SCH stores the incoming spatio-temporal traffic
data in a time window (time duration) generated at regular
intervals of time and performs the following operations.
Diagrammatic representation of SCH and basic operations
performed on tagged contextual data is illustrated in Fig. 4 (a)
and Fig. 4(b) respectively.
Interpreter: Every received location-tagged data signal
is passed through the Contextual Interpreter to retrieve
the node component status and its corresponding
observed readings.
Node Context Analyzer: It evaluates node component
status data to know the working status and lifetime of
the data generator. The Node Context Analyzer uses
strength of the signal (RSSI), sensor age, battery state
relative to the minimum operating power, voltage
output from the transducer present in the calibration
field and delay in response (sensor response hysteresis
affecting data quality) to check fitness of the node and
generates alerts through web services for node
replacement and reconfiguration of the network if there
is a random unwanted variation.
If there is no unwanted variation, the contextual
readings of a place (traffic situation sensed by sensors)
is geo-tagged with the SCH ID and timestamp (WSN
ID, its location, time window during which data are
collected), and then forwarded to the SFNs.
Contextual Data Generator: The modular structure of
the SCH maintains spatial and temporal consistency of
data via context information. As soon as the time
window reaches its maximum, the data stream is
forwarded via ICT infrastructure to SFNs without any
delay.
The SFNs deployed at traffic intersection points need to
ensure the reception of data from nearby predesignated
SCHs. The SFN conditions the data received from
SFNs to filter out inaccuracies in collected data by
removing outliers, and validate the context of the data
generated from hardware and communciation faults.
 2016 Intl. Conference on Advances in Computing, Communications and Informatics (ICACCI), Sept. 21-24, 2016, Jaipur, India
(a)
(b)
Fig. 4. Diagrammatic representation of (a) SCH module, and (b) basic
operations performed on tagged contextual data.
B. Smart Fusion Nodes
The SFNs keep receiving Big data from various
heterogeneous sources including SCH, crowd-sourced data via
participatory sensing (GPS equipped mobile phones, cars),
video surveillance data, etc. The volume of data becomes large
based on the frequency of data being collected. To visualize the
effect of traffic state on a road and manage the traffic flow,
SFNs provide an open platform that can implement
machine learning with parallel computing for executing real-
time data analytics. The flexible nature of the SFN enables it to
intelligently fuse & analyze the complex data stream, for
creating meaningful information from data generated from
physical and computing environment. The operations handled
by various components of SFNs as depicted in Fig. 5 (a) and
Fig. 5(b), viz. data classifier, intelligent router etc, are
discussed below.
363
(a)
(b)
Fig. 5. Diagrammatic representation of (a) SFN module and (b) operations
performed by the components to estimate traffic situation.
Primary Context Data Classifier and Intelligent Router:
Based on the frequency of data collection, classifier
extract features/attributes along with its corresponding
measurement for each road segment (context) from the
data received in a given time window. It categorizes the
features into spatial and temporal data sets for training.
It uses the Knowledge Base to select the
training/learning methods to be applied. The Intelligent
Router dynamically routes the incoming traffic data
across multiple PEs, to provide load balance (distribute
the load in terms of data volume) and achieve better
fault tolerance.
Data Fusion Engine: Fuses the data from different
sources and executes the spatial and temporal classifier
based on inference rules in Knowledge Base to generate
temporal traffic pattern of an area to correlate the traffic
flow at two connecting routes. The final output is high
level context information that can be used to perform
 2016 Intl. Conference on Advances in Computing, Communications and Informatics (ICACCI), Sept. 21-24, 2016, Jaipur, India
other calculations, such as based on the traffic pattern
(congestion level) a travel plan can be made using
vehicle speed and distance to reach a destination and
control traffic signal timings to smooth the traffic flow.
Decision Logic: Whenever a threshold condition
defined by decision logic (the rule engine applies
probabilistic logic or fuzzy logic) is reached, an alert
message is sent to the nearby traffic control points on
the route to divert the incoming traffic to some other
routes. Similarly, when the traffic density is below the
threshold, the traffic can be allowed again to move
through the same route.
Smart Decision & Control Enabler: The generated data
stream is then stored in the cloud that acts as a platform
for everything-as-a-service. The distributed archived
data can be analyzed statistically to understand the trend
of traffic under a range of conditions (normal, extreme)
at different times of day. Based on this data, the
behavior of traffic during periods of extreme congestion
can be determined.
VII. CONCLUSION
With the deployment of several hundred of sensors across
smart cities, huge amount of data is generated every second.
The Big data so generated can be effectively used for providing
a host of solutions to smart city dwellers. The paper discusses
few strategies to handle Big data for smart traffic in smart
cities. However, for effective implementation of strategies, a
ubiquitous computational platform that facilitates seamless
flow of information is necessary. The SWIFT architecture
developed by us in one of our earlier works, provides necessary
ICT infrastructure to handle Big data. In this paper, we discuss
the application of SWIFT architecture to facilitate the
collection and process of Big data related to all kinds of real-
time traffic information through sensors, IoT devices,
crowdsourced data, etc., to provide an adaptive solution for
real-time traffic monitoring and control, traffic trend prediction
etc. In addition, the framework supports the decision-makers to
control the traffic signaling cycle in order to reduce the waiting
time at traffic signals and provide better alternative route
selection to travelers. Further, based on trends of traffic flow at
different periods of day, the platform can be utilized to
facilitate the mining of Big data to estimate total emissions and
noise level, and initiate actions to divert the incoming traffic to
less congested roads.
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