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IBM driver tools to predict traffic jam
By siliconindia
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Thursday, 14 April 2011, 20:27 IST
San Francisco: IBM is coming up with new software to predict traffic jams. The employees of IBM have been testing technology that will help drivers to avoid traffic jam. IBM Researchers worked with California state highway authorities and a Mobile Millennium Team at the University of Berkeley, California, on the project.
Those who are involved in pilot project agree to have location-sensing capabilities in their smartphones to track the traffic. This smartphone application lets people receive customized alerts warning of probable traffic trouble before they set out on drives.
The service is powered by a "first-of-its-kind learning and predictive analytics tool" called the Traffic Prediction Tool (TPT) developed by IBM Research. TPT analyzes congestion data, commuter locations and expected travel start times throughout a metropolitan region that can affect commuters on highways, rail-lines and urban roads.
The commuters have to feed through the Internet about their regular road and through the software they will be warned about the condition of the traffic. This will help them to decide which way to take.
John Day, IBM Smarter Traveler program manager said,"We wanted to take advantage of analytic tools to provide predictive capabilities; to get correlations with minor slowdowns and major ones that happen after that, so you can run a query at any point for a journey and predict 35 or 40 minutes in advance what it will look like, then couple that with a personal approach for the individual traveler."