Dublin City Council Is Leveraging Big Data to Reduce Traffic Congestion
Employing 6,000 people, Dublin City Council (DCC) delivers housing, water and transport services to 1.2 million citizens across the Irish capital. To keep the city moving, the council’s traffic control center (TCC) works together with local transport operators to manage an extensive network of roads, tramways and bus lanes. Using operational data from the TCC, the council’s roads and traffic department is responsible for predicting Dublin’s future transport requirements, and developing effective strategies to meet them.
Like local governments in many large European cities, DCC has a wide array of technology at its disposal. Sensors such as inductive-loop traffic detectors, rain gauges and closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras collect data from across Dublin, and each of the city’s 1,000 buses transmits a GPS update every 20 seconds.
Tackling Traffic Congestion
In the past, only a small proportion of this Big Data was available to controllers at Dublin’s TCC – reducing their ability to identify, anticipate and address the causes of traffic congestion.
As Brendan O’Brien, Head of Technical Services–Roads and Traffic Department at Dublin City Council, explains: “Previously, our TCC systems only offered a narrow window on the overall status of our transport network–for example, controllers could only view the status of individual bus routes. Our legacy systems were also unable to monitor the geospatial location of Dublin’s bus fleet, which further complicated the traffic control process.” He continues: “Because we couldn’t see the ‘health’ of the whole transport network in real time, it was very difficult to identify traffic congestion in its early stages. This meant that the causes of delays had often moved on by the time our TCC operators were able to select the appropriate CCTV feed–making it hard to determine and mitigate the factors causing congestion.”
DCC wanted to ease traffic congestion across Dublin. To achieve this, the council needed to find a way to integrate, process and visualize large amounts of structured and unstructured data from its network of sensor arrays–all in real time.
Becoming a Smarter City
To help develop a smarter approach to traffic control, DCC entered into a research partnership with IBM Research–Ireland. Francesco Calabrese, Research Manager–Smarter Urban Dynamics at IBM Research, comments: “Smarter Cities are cities with the tools to extract actionable insights from massive amounts of constantly changing data, and deliver those insights instantly to decision-makers. At the IBM Smarter Cities Technology Centre in Dublin, our goal is to develop innovative solutions to enable cities like Dublin to support smarter ways of working–delivering a better quality of life for their citizens.”
Today, DCC makes all of its data available to the IBM Smarter Cities Technology Centre in Dublin. Using Big Data analytics technologies, IBM Research is developing new solutions for Smarter Cities, and making the deep insights it discovers available to the council’s roads and traffic department.
“From our first discussion with the IBM Research team, we realized that our goals were perfectly aligned,” says O’Brien. “Using our data, the IBM Smarter Cities Technology Centre can both drive its own research, and deliver innovative solutions to help us visualize transport data from sensor arrays across the city.”
Analyzing the Transport Network
As a first step, IBM integrated geospatial data from buses and data on bus timetables into a central geographic information system. Using IBM InfoSphere Streams and mapping software, IBM researchers created a digital map of the city, overlaid with the real-time positions of Dublin’s 1,000 buses. “In the past, our TCC operators could only see the status of individual bus corridors,” says O’Brien. “Now, each TCC operator gets a twin-monitor setup – one displaying a dashboard, and the other a real-time map of all buses across the city.
“Using the dashboard screen, operators can drill down to see the number of buses that are on-time or delayed on each route. This information is also displayed visually on the map screen, allowing operators to see the current status of the