Odense Smart City: Intelligent Traffic Systems

Odense, Denmark • Sep 10, 2018

The University of Southern Denmark (SDU) is supporting the Open Data Experimentarium (ODEx), a beacon project to implement the strategic plan of engaging with society. The work package “Smart City: Intelligent Traffic System” is focused on implementing this plan in collaboration with the municipality of Odense. The package runs from 2017 to 2019.

The City of Odense is collecting data on the traffic of vehicles in the urban road network and it wishes to make them publicly available through a platform in order to facilitate the analysis and the development of applications based on these data. Currently, the only example of use of the data from traffic in the City of Odense is the smartphone app “Odense Guide” but the potential is much broader and the aim of this work package is to exploit this potential. The package aims at applying, to the context of the city of Odense, and to other cities of the region of Southern Denmark, existing and novel information and communication technologies for the collection, management and analysis of data and specifically of data concerning the mobility of citizens. The ultimate goal is to produce tools for information communication and improved decision making in order to reduce congestion and CO2 emissions and to increase security. At the onset, this work package will set up a platform for the collection, exchange and maintenance of data. Once this infrastructure is established, the focus will be on data analytics. In particular, we perform three types of data analysis: descriptive, predictive and prescriptive. In descriptive analysis, we extract information from data and disseminate it via visualizations. Examples of outcomes from this phase are congestion and pollution density maps, anomaly detection, and event correlation. These outcomes can be based both on historical data and on real-time data. In predictive analysis, we make mathematical models and multi agent systems to predict the traffic flow development. Finally, in prescriptive analysis, we focus on traffic management. Decisions like traffic signal settings, bus line routes, bus timetables, vehicle routing and network design are approached with state-of-the-art mathematical and computer science methods with the aim of finding optimal or near optimal solutions. While addressing these tasks, the ODEx Smart City work package aims at developing competences, demonstration systems and resources at SDU and at the collaborating partners for handling, maintaining, distributing and analyzing traffic data.