Power |
Telecom |
Transport |
Others
Use of GIS in transportation management
Challenges :
The challenges in effective Transportation management are many. The number of Vehicles on the roads is steadily increasing where as the roads and the land available for building new roads are very limited. Managing , redirecting and decongesting the traffic within the existing roads and space is indeed a challenging task.
Methodology:
Geographical Information systems (GIS) in the recent past has acquired tremendous importance in various applications.In general any application which has a spatial phenomenon can leverage the GIS technology.
By the use of GIS and GPS (Global Positioning Systems) it is possible to continuously track the location of Vehicles at any given point of time. So far this Technology which is very popularly referred as Automatic Vehicle Location (AVL) is being effectively used for fleet management and is provided by AVL service providers. This technology with its high cost of implementation and specific use has been limited as it is used mainly by companies owning large fleet of vehicles to track their Vehicles.
But with all the advancements made in the fields of GIS and especially the decreasing size and cost of GPS it is possible to use the same AVL technologies, to track any Vehicle that is just out of the assembly line. All the trucks,cars and even two wheelers can be fitted with a GPS which is as small as a chip and which gives an accurate position of the Vehicle in terms of longitude and latitude.
Once the vehicles are fitted with the GPS a centralized traffic control room which has all the necessary equipments to view and analyse the location of every vehicle on the road can be made use of. This centralized traffic control room can have many computer terminals, each of them concentrating on viewing and analyzing the Vehicular traffic at the important junctions, roads of the city which has a large flow of traffic. The system also can be built as an intelligent system which is capable of generating alternate routes if there is a jam at any point of time. The system can be used to know the average number of vehicles plying on each road on a daily basis. The same data can be stored in a database and later mined which can be very useful in various activities of traffic planning and management .