IBM Brazil deploys data for smoother traffic
A Q&A with Antonio Carlos Dias, Smarter Cities executive at IBM Brazil
Published October 28, 2014
As announced in September, IBM and the Agencia de Transporte do Estado de Sao Paulo (ARTESP), the regulatory agency that oversees public transportation for the State of Sao Paulo, Brazil, are collaborating to improve transit for 20 million people.
By opening an information control center, designed to ensure the quality of service on the state’s highways, the effort will unify traffic data, incident management, and service delivery through the use of advanced analytics.
The effort is notable for its considered approach to one of the world’s most prevailing and aggravating problems.
Insights Magazine corresponded with Antonio Carlos Dias, Smarter Cities executive at IBM Brazil, to learn more about why analytics is the answer to the modern traffic jam.
Insights Magazine: 20 million people are using the roadways of one of Brazil’s most thriving states. Why is IBM Intelligent Transportation the right technology for this solution?
Antonio Carlos Dias: IBM has end-to-end solutions for a Smarter Planet. IBM Intelligent Transportation is one of the main solutions for traffic management, due to its ability to integrate and visualize information from multiple sources, with analytical capabilities to help decision-making and improving traffic. [It also helps] ARTESP to oversee the services provided by local operators of the state's highways. As well, it improves transportation for Brazilian citizens.
IM: What is notable about the data that is involved with so many vehicles and such large geography?
Carlos Dias: ARTESP says that [real-time] monitoring of all the data from technical and operational occurrences from 6300 kilometers of highway made their supervising much more efficient. The data collected by the Information Control Center (CCI) is fundamental to oversight the contracts of highway concessionaires.
IM: This concept carries long-term significance?
Carlos Dias: In addition to real-time observation, analyzed data is important to implement long-term actions to improve traffic and road safety. The camera images received in the CCI are also integrated with the monitoring of crimes of the state of São Paulo system, known as Detects. This has helped in combating crimes.
IM: How does data flow in this solution?
Carlos Dias: Events come into IBM Intelligent Operation Center (IOC) from different forms, which are based on the nature of the operations and domains in the central operations hub. The events can be classified as triggers, thresholds, complex events, and manually generated events. In addition, we have the IBM Intelligent Transportation, which has three dialogs (Request/Response; Subscription; and Publication) between owner centers connected to field devices and the external center.
IM: As the system is new, ARTESP is still developing the indicators that will help them measure CCI's performance. How does the system sort data points?
Carlos Dias: Traffic Management Data Dictionary (TMDD) data objects will be categorized into different categories. Communications between the external center provided by IBM Intelligent Transportation and owner centers, known as Center-to-Center (C2C) communications, require peer-to-peer network connections. These connections are typically through local or wide area networks.