The original description of the project reads:
"Based on emerging Cloud computing technology, this project will investigate the design of a reference architecture and prototype implementation of an open urban traffic control service. The project will investigate the marriage of an infrastructure for urban-scale sensing, defined as a dynamically varying set of self-describing Web services, with a control infrastructure providing services implementing signal control, incident detection, and vehicle scheduling. Crucial to the architecture is the availability of services that provide sufficient semantic description to allow the information provided to be exploited by traffic monitoring and control algorithms. In addition, the trustworthiness and quality of service requirements for such a sensing infrastructure must be specified and monitored to ensure correct behaviour. The architecture will support the deployment of a range of potential urban traffic control algorithms and provide a basis for their objective comparison and, potentially, dynamic context-aware algorithm selection."
- use some cloud computing infrastructure
- to make an urban traffic control service
- that can retrieve data from a bunch of web services, which represents the data from a city
- and implement traffic monitoring and control services
- whose algorithms are implemented depending the context
Sounds simple! So I guess the first step is to find out what exactly all the definitions are above. I would also want to start looking for a suitable cloud computing infrastructure (I hear Amazon EC2 is the bees knees). Then perhaps find out what type of data is coming from these web services and what useful things I can do with them. I should also find out what algorithms are out there that provide signal control, incident detection, and vehicle scheduling and defining their context so I can select them when appropriate.
My Supervisor are pointed me toward two exists UTC systems, SCATS and SCOOT. I should also start looking there for ideas.
There's a lot to do and a small amount of time to do it. Better get to it.
