The Challenge
Rather than building more roads to meet increased use and alleviate congestion, the DOT sought to leverage technology to optimize traffic management. The organization had multiple data sets, which presented two challenges:
- First, data had to be assessed, organized and enriched.
- Second, access to data had to be democratized for various internal teams, which would allow the data to be used for new purposes.
The Solution
To start, Cloudreach constructed the initial architecture and developed several data pipelines with a focus on providing an operational view of speed, weather, and incident data. In addition, we migrated a large enterprise data warehouse from Oracle into BigQuery.
In a second phase, Cloudreach continued to refine and build the data platform to ingest multiple sources of data, from historical and real-time data gathered from the State’s fleet of IoT devices and events logged by operators into their traffic management system, to third party datasets such as Waze James and weather data provided by NCAR. The system was designed to leverage Smart Devices across its highways.
With the GCP solution, the DOT was able to leverage the strength of its technologies to build a robust, future-proof data analytics platform that, over time, can be used for machine learning and AI.
The Outcome
The Traffic Management Data Platform enables the DOT to:
- Gain enhanced situational awareness based on traffic patterns.
- Help coordinate responses based on real-time insights.
- Predict road and device maintenance requirements.
Utilization of third party tooling, such as Looker, further democratizes access to the data across various teams and reduces dependence on aging on-premise data center infrastructure.
Over time, the platform will be used to enable public notifications, real-time signaling based on traffic events, variable speed limits, and autonomous cars.
About the Customer
Our customer was the Department of Transport (DOT) for a large state. They are responsible for providing a safe and efficient roadway system by performing construction, maintenance, and snow and ice removal. The DOT manages many thousands of miles of highways and thousands of bridges across the state’s broad geographic area.
