Spatial-temporal traffic data analysis based on global data management using MAS

The spatial-temporal traffic data analysis based on global data management is a newly developed and crucial approach to help traffic managers having the global view of urban traffic status in the level of road network, which is very clearly useful in traffic control and route guidance. The multiagent systems are used in traffic data management with full consideration of the characteristics of traffic data and the cooperation and workflow among them. In software implementation of data management, the agent-based common object request broker architecture is adopted taking the distributed urban traffic data in the large area under network environments into account. Based on the global traffic data, the approach of visualized spatial-temporal analysis is then induced. The similarity of traffic data is analyzed first for each link and its profile is achieved to undertake the primary processing of urban traffic data. Furthermore, analysis results are shown on the basis of the geographic information systems for transportation. The two types of visualization, pseudocolor and contour maps, are adopted in the demonstration to display the traffic status graphically and its changing frames. Among the applications in some big cities in China, the case of urban traffic analysis for Beijing is studied to demonstrate the implementation of the approach.