Periodic Reporting for period 2 - SETA (SETA: An open, sustainable, ubiquitous data and service ecosystem for efficient, effective, safe, resilient mobility in metropolitan areas)
Periodo di rendicontazione: 2017-08-01 al 2019-01-31
The SETA solution will be based on the management of high-volume, high-velocity, multi-dimensional, heterogeneous, cross-media, cross-sectoral data and information which is sensed, crowdsourced, acquired, linked, fused, and used to model mobility with a precision, granularity and dynamicity that is impossible with today’s technologies.
SETA will create methodologies and technologies for: (i) Effective and efficient gathering of large-scale heterogeneous data and information sensed by physical sensors, mobile devices, collected over large scale via participatory sensing and crowdsourcing, as well as derived from institutional, public and private bases; (ii) Designing and developing real-time, personalised and ubiquitous transport and mobility services for citizens and businesses; (iii) Designing and developing a dashboard for decision makers which will allow effective daily and long-term planning of transport in the metropolitan areas, as well as support resilience and safety of mobility.
Data acquisition work includes (i) passive sensing: low cost environmental sensors, video image analysis to determine road and public transport occupancy and WiFi/Bluetooth monitoring for both occupancy counting and public space and indoor location/activity monitoring; both the image analysis and Bluetooth monitoring technologies are being exploited in future projects; (ii) opportunistic (social media) monitoring technologies were developed for incident detection, this work was exploited in the sporting domain by a now successful start-up; and (iii) participatory sensing: to track both motorised and non-motorised activity (technology for the latter being the main developed focus within the project), also soliciting direct responses from citizens concerning mobility issues. The work on motorised monitoring has lead to further uses of the tracking data (e.g. investigation of road safety), which is currently being developed as a service. The non-motorised monitoring technology has been used within a health initiative which involving 100,000s of UK citizens. Methodologies have been implemented for extracting and fusing information from the various sensors in order to provide estimates of the traffic speeds for future use in the predictive modelling. The data acquired from the sensing and fusion was used to enhance local and network-wide traffic modelling, for example incorporating turn and origin-destination information. The novel work in both the fusion and modelling has resulted dozens of conference and journal publications.
SETA has developed a platform which supports real-time, high volume visualisation and analysis allowing decision makers’ to observe in real-time mobility issues. The various stakeholders can interact with the SETA platform to gain personal or city-wide mobility understanding. This work involves the development of: (i) a variety of mobile apps for specific cities and services; (ii) a routing engine which considers environmental data as well as speed/distance; (iii) portals into the SETA Data Management Platform to provide understanding of the current state of the sensors and network; and (iv) a facet-based DSS which allows analysts to examine large-scale mobility data, and constraining and relaxing information facets to focus on the area specific interest.
The SETA technologies are integrated within the cloud-based Data Management Platform, providing specialised common API, architecture and infrastructure to support low-latency, scalable management, analysis and development of multimodal mobility with smooth and scalable collection, indexing, manipulation and sharing of heterogeneous, multimodal, dynamic mobility data. The platform has been released in multiple iterations, in line with a well-defined agile software development process and technical procedures, enabling rapid development, prototype evaluation and effective testing, maintenance and integration of new components
The University of Sheffield’s activity monitoring technology is being employed in a number of UK health initiatives to get the population more active and has been used by 100,000 of users.
The University of Sheffield’s social media monitoring technology, in particular the real-time, large-scale processing framework, name-entity linking and veracity assessment technologies have been adopted by a UK company (footballwhispers.com) and used to provide a rumour detection system to predict transfer likelihoods. This UK start-up was established around the begin of the SETA project and in the last two years has won a number of technology awards and has grown to over 20 employees.
The Floow’s technology, originally for monitoring driver performance for insurance, is now being considered for supporting for traffic management, resolution approaches for hazardous junctions, input into pollution investigations, modelling and infrastructure evaluations. The developed of proof of value demonstrations have triggered a range of follow on scientific work which will continue beyond the project end.