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JOURNAL OF COMPUTING, VOLUME 4, ISSUE 4, APRIL 2012, ISSN 2151-9617 https://sites.google.com/site/journalofcomputing WWW.JOURNALOFCOMPUTING.

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Development of a GIS-Based Monitoring System for Road Network


Souad El houssaini, Abdelmajid Badri
AbstractThis paper presents an integrated framework of Geographic Information System (GIS) and a Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) equipped with interactive communication capabilities. The model integrates the design of the database and the management of implementation of the monitoring system which includes the operations of query and analysis using the web and desktop applications. This study aims to apply techniques of analysis of the road network in a GIS to collect geographic data on the monitoring station and the roads. The information on road infrastructure is not only useful for locating monitoring stations, but it is also important to guide a station to follow the shortest path to achieve the objectives of management and routing. Optimal routes based on the minimum cost are identified using Dijkstras algorithm. Graphical User Interfaces (GUI) were developed to visualize the information collected on the model entities, and also to provide synthesis operations based on graphs using data tables and objects in the map. The proposed system should be an effective and intelligent tool for a rapid intervention and to improve the monitoring of the road network which can eventually be extended to a national infrastructure of GIS. Simulated test cases have been carried out for network of Mohammedia City in Morocco. Index TermsGIS, Location, Routing, Road network, Monitoring, Dijkstras algorithm.

oadsafetyhaslongbeenamajorconcernintheroad sector. Road accidents can cause serious injury or death; these effects can also lead to significant economic losses for the payee. Accidents each year are more deaths and injuries. According to statistics, the situation is more alarming. The traffic accidents have increased. Hence the monitoringsitesarestillatopicalissue.Newinformation technologies have been proposed and proven to be valid and effective to solve reallife problems, such as monitoring of road accidents. GIS (Geographic InformationSystem)technologyisoneofthehottestnew research tools in the word today and one of the fastest growinghightechofmonitoring[1].GIScanbringallthat data together quickly and let users analyze and visualize information in an efficient way. Location and routing are technique commonly used in GIS for decision making. Architectures for information browsing, like the World Wide Web (www), are easy and powerful means to deploydatabasesthroughtheInternetandthusrepresent obvious options for setting up services such as the one advocated in this work. The www is useful to provide accesstocentraldatastorage,tocollectremotedataandto allowGISandoptimizationsoftwaretointeract[2]. This study aims to implement and evaluate a methodologybasedonGIStodetermineoptimalroutesof the road network using key information items based on costofdistance.Forthatreason,anintegratedapproachto locationandrouting,andanapplicationthatcansupport thedecision,mayrepresentanimportantcompetitive

1 INTRODUCTION

advantage.Withthispaperwewilltrytohelpandfillthat gap, presenting a decision tool for monitoring stations. This approach saves time. Its rationale is based on the development of a distributed environment for the integration of software applications that share data and operations through a common database repository and whichcansupportthemanipulationandretrievalofdata. This effort is chiefly based on careful definitions of data type objects and the construction of focused methods to manipulate them. The following paragraphs present requirements, available tools, and the architecture of the framework followed by implementation and conclusion andfutureworks.

2 REQUIREMENTS
Figure 1 depicts a use case and the use case diagram for the Management System for Road Safety (MSRS). Use cases are used for documentation of functional requirements and for communication between stakeholdersanddevelopers.Thisisacommonpracticein softwareengineeringthatensuresthesoftwaredevelopers understandtherequirements.Thus,thedevelopedsystem is expected to address the requirements set by the stakeholders.

3 AVAILABLE TOOLS
3.1 Geographic Information System (GIS)
Geography Information Systems have been improving since1970s.GISisanessentialtoolforlocationmapping, dynamicconditionvisualization,anddecisionmaking[3], [4],[5].Geospatialdataareusefulinmonitoringresponse to accidents. The analysis of realtime data could be achieved through GIS during the response phase to support visualization and automation for efficient decisionmaking.ResearchhasbeenconductedinGISthat focused on areas such as shortest path analysis [6], [7].

S. El houssaini is with Laboratory of Electronics, Electrotechnics, Automatic & Information Processing, Faculty of Sciences and Technology of Mohammedia, Hassan II Mohammedia- Casablanca University, Morocco. A Badri is with Laboratory of Electronics, Electrotechnics, Automatic & Information Processing, Faculty of Sciences and Technology of Mohammedia, Hassan II Mohammedia- Casablanca University, Morocco.

JOURNAL OF COMPUTING, VOLUME 4, ISSUE 4, APRIL 2012, ISSN 2151-9617 https://sites.google.com/site/journalofcomputing WWW.JOURNALOFCOMPUTING.ORG

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This shows the great poten s ntial of GIS applications to ifth hegeospatial information isimplement tedintheini itial phas seofresponse etoaccidents s.

fa acilitatethep possibilityof havingares sponsetimes shorter henfindsthe eleastcostpa athfromany originnodestothe th destination n d node. The lo ogical procedure of Dijkstras algorithmisas a sfollows[8]( (Fig.2):

lgorithm 3.2 Dijkstras al


Dijkstras algorith calculates the least ac hm ccumulated c cost betw ween the dest tination node and every o e other node, a and


Fig. 1. Use ca diagram and use case for M ase d MSRS.


Fig. 2. Initial sate (A) and fina state (B) of a graph using Dijk al g kstra's algorithm m.

(A)

(B)

JOURNAL OF COMPUTING, VOLUME 4, ISSUE 4, APRIL 2012, ISSN 2151-9617 https://sites.google.com/site/journalofcomputing WWW.JOURNALOFCOMPUTING.ORG

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(1) Let the node at which we are starting be called the sourcenode.Assigntothesourcenodeaninitialvalueof zero and to all other nodes an initial value of infinity. Markallnodesasunvisited.Setsourcenodeascurrent. (2) For the current node, consider its unvisited nodes directly connected by links having cost values and calculatetheiraccumulatedcostsfromtheunvisitednodes to the source node. If the new accumulated cost is less thanthepreviouslyrecordedcost,overwritethecost. (3)Whenallnodesdirectlyconnectedtothecurrentnode are completely considered, mark the current node as visited.Avisitednodewillnotbecheckedagainsothatits accumulateddistanceisfinalandtheleast. (4)Ifallnodeshavebeenvisited,finish.Otherwise,setthe unvisited node (with the least accumulated cost to the source node) as the next current node and continue fromstep2. The Dijkstras algorithm is very similar to the A* algorithm. The cost function (c) used to evaluate shortest paths in the Dijkstra algorithm is augmented by an estimator function that is used to estimate the shortest pathbetweentwogivengraphnodes[i.e.,c(s,d)=g(s,v)+ h(v,d),whereg(s,v)isthecostfromsourcestovandh(v, d)istheheuristicestimatedcostfromvtothedestination d]. The estimator function is a heuristic function that can be chosen arbitrarily. If the estimator function is 0 A* turnsintoDijkstrasalgorithm[9]. In our system, the routing service has been implemented using the Dijkstras algorithm in the road network of the city of Mohammedia. The algorithm was implemented with PHP in Cartoweb environment. The version of Cartoweb used is 3.5.0 and runs with Windows XP operatingsystem.Cartowebnotonlyallowsthehandling of road maps online using userfriendly interfaces, but it also allows to implement the routing plugin nome pgrouting, it runs client side and server side. The user candefinethepointsofbeginningandendoftheshortest pathbyselectingtheirnames(namesofstreets). Begin Algorithm Variables

Whenever a routing operation is performed, their names are passed as parameters from the client interface to the server (Fig. 3). The server connects to the database, it prepares the request, it computes the shortest path connecting the given points, draw it on the map with a differentcolor.Figure4depictstheshortestpathbetween Boulevard11JanvierandBoulevardSebtaintheroad networkinMohammedia.
Fig. 4. Visualization of the shortest path.

4 SYSTEM DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION


4.1 Architecture
The web framework based on a threetier architecture consisting of the client layer, middleware layer and the layer of the database (Fig. 5). These components together provideaunifiedinterfaceforconsultationdata,request and decision making for users, the database is accessed throughtheInternet,insuchawaythattheuserdoesnot need to be aware of the location of the database, it is sufficient that the user is able to consult, add modify the dataasneeded. Application uses PostgreSQL as the database management system with the geospatial extension PostGIS. Additional to relational queries, PostGIS provides spatial queries to the users. The GIS products used are Mapserver and Cartoweb, Mapserver is used herejustaslibraryPhpMapScript,Cartowebisasolution designedfortheweb,itallowsitsarchitectureCartoClient / CartoServer to answer several web service in the world offreeWebMapping.ItfitseasilywithApacheandphp5. Webbased GIS users can use a Web browser to navigate mapsandtocompletebasicspatialanalysis.Therequests from the user are sent to clients by way of HTML forms. The form is passed to the Web Server Apache and a gateway at the Web Server passes the request to GIS serverCartoweb,thenCartowebqueriesthedatabase. The described system is designed to support two types of users: the system administrator and the teleoperators. The system administrator must update the databases(useraccountsandlayers)andguaranteeallthe functionalities. All other data are entered, edited and deleted by the teleoperators through a distributed Graphical User Interfaces (GUI). Data collected and used

S, T: Point; i, n : Integer; { n: number of requests} For i=1 to n Selection of S Source and T Target point; Connection to the database; Determination of the arcs to be served with their costs; Calculation of the shortest path between S and T; Displaying the solution geographic of shortest path on map; End i End Algorithm
Fig. 3. The proposed routing solution with Dijkstras algorithm.

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by the system are of two different types: geographic and semantic. The geographic database contains the geographic map of the road network in the region of interest, monitoring stations and all the geographic informationneededtogenerateanoutputGISontheWeb. The semantic data, maintained by a relational database, containsinformationabouttheaccidents,breakdowns,the monitoringstationandvehicles.

4.2 Implementation
TheGlobalPositioningSystem(GPS)isusedtocollectthe values of longitude (X) and latitude (Y) identifying the geographiclocationofmonitoringsites.Thevaluesofthe GPS coordinates, expressed in meters, are conversed into Lambert coordinates. The projection system used is Lambert Morocco (Business Expansion, IAV Hassan II), Zone I (Northern Morocco). The application is based on realdataembeddedinmapsaslayers.Semanticdatabase is managed by the management system of the database PostgreSQL. Graphic layers obtained with GIS from the digitization of monitoring stations (police and civil protection), street names and the road network of the Mohammedia city are imported into the cartridge spatial DBMS: PostGIS. The choice was preferentially oriented means Opensource such as Mapserver, Cartoweb and PostgreSQL. To implement the application, we used an ObjectOriented (OO) methodology (Unified Modeling LanguageUML) and PHP, version 5. The developed applicationis organizedaroundamainwindow,withall the functionalities accessible in this window, through the toolbar, or the menu (in a way easily understandable by users). Thetooldevelopediscomposedofaset ofgraphical user interfaces. It was implemented for Windows platforms and has an open architecture which allows an easy integration of new functionality. The teleoperator usesGUItomaketheinterpretationofinformationeasier (Fig.6).
Fig. 5. System Architecture.

Fig. 6. The GUI of different visualizations tabs.

CONCLUSION

Inthispaper,wedescribedanintelligentsystemofferinga solutiontothetreatmentofaccidentsofemergencyinthe city of Mohammedia in Morocco for automatic traffic monitoring. An operation of great significance for this treatmentisthedeliverynearestmonitoringstationtothe sites asking for help to save property and people. The geographical location of monitoring stations used to display their spatial distribution. The ObjectOriented system management database of road safety is based on the integration of GIS. The GIS are tools used to manage geographic information. They have become tools for decisionsupport.TheimprovedefficiencybyGISreduces thetaskofmaintainingpapermaps.Thesystemhasbeen testedinareallifecasestudy,itsarchitectureinvolvesan integrated framework of Geographical Information System (GIS) and a Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) equipped with interactive communication.TheWebbasedGISframeworkfacilitates the orientation of the nearest monitoring station to the locationoftheaccident.

JOURNAL OF COMPUTING, VOLUME 4, ISSUE 4, APRIL 2012, ISSN 2151-9617 https://sites.google.com/site/journalofcomputing WWW.JOURNALOFCOMPUTING.ORG

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There are several advantages of the developed system. First, every related person with access rights can utilize the system and share the information easily. Time saving and flexibility are other important merits of the system. The system is ObjectOriented (OO), understandable and flexible, it has potential to be integrated with the other roads networks and to be expandedtoanationalbase,sothemodelcanbeextended to all cities of Morocco using the GIS technology with RDBMSs. The proposed approach has demonstrated an important step towards improvement on roads accidents management, there is still room for improving this approach. For example, this approach could be implementedusing: GSMtoknowthepreciselocationoftheaccident. CombineGSMwithGPStoimproveservicelocation.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This work falls within the scope of telecommunication projects. We would like to thank the Department of technologyoftheMESFCRSTforfinancingourprojects.

REFERENCES
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