CrowdITS: Crowdsourcing in intelligent transportation systems

Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) and their applications are attracting significant attention in research and industry. ITS makes use of various sensing and communication technologies to assist transportation authorities and vehicles drivers in making informative decisions and provide leisure and safe driving experience. Data collection and dispersion are of utmost importance for the proper operation of ITS applications. Numerous standards, architectures and communication protocols have been anticipated for ITS applications. However, existing schemes are based on assumption that vehicles and roadside devices are equipped with sensing and communication capabilities. One of the major gaps of these approaches is their inability to capture events that can easily be logged by drivers using their mobile phones. In this paper, we propose to fill the gap by the use of Crowdsourcing in ITS namely, CrowdITS. In CrowdITS human inputs, along with available sensory data, are collected and communicated to a processing server using mobile phones. The basic idea is to use the Crowd with smart mobile phones to enable certain ITS applications without the need of any special sensors or communication devices, both in-vehicle and on-road. Alternatively, we integrate and aggregate human inputs with multiple information sources, and then selectively disseminate the aggregated information based on the driver's geo-location. Conceptually, the major change is to integrate human inputs, with multiple information sources, aggregate and finally it is localized according to the driver's geo-location. We describe the design of CrowdITS, report on the development of key ITS applications using Android and iPhone mobile phones, and outline the future work in the development of crowdsourced-based applications for intelligent transportation systems.