A Smartphone-Based Probe Data Platform for Road Management and Safety in Developing Countries

Abstract

In the developing countries, it is challenging to understand the road conditions and driving behavior due to the high cost and unavailability of appropriate equipment. Taking the advantage of collective intelligence recorded by cheap and widely-available smartphones, this paper proposes a probe data platform for sensing, detecting and visualizing road roughness and driving behavior using smartphones and cloud computing. Our implementation has been deployed 1) to collect real driving records on different roads in Hyderabad city in India, and 2) to visualize significant difference in terms of road conditions as well as driving behavior. This research work aims to establish a platform for better road planning, management and safety through distributed data collection and data analytics.