A situation-aware mobile traffic information system prototype

With the current evolution of mobile communication and Internet computing mobile services will play an increasing role in future work and private life. Especially enabling mobility in urban and populous areas needs tools for individual traffic planning. In this paper we present a prototype of a traffic information system enabling not only plain route planning, but also advanced services like traffic jam alerting, etc. Using a centralized database architecture our service integrates a location-based service with a situation-aware traffic information system. The fast changing nature of traffic data requires that traffic information is gathered from a variety of on-line Internetsources featuring traffic jam, weather, or road work information. Our asynchronous update strategy of the central service database allows to meet real-time requirements though providing up to date information. In the course of this paper we will investigate all necessary capabilities, present the development of our prototypical system, and give a case study on applying our prototype for real world use. Modern XML technology together with appropriate XSLT stylesheets allows the automatic conversion of generic traffic information for the delivery to a variety of mobile devices. In summary we believe that intelligently joining the latest powerful technologies for preference modeling, database-driven evaluation and standard XML technologies today promises a breakthrough for mobile information systems