Introduction

Transportation has been one of the most important activities of human existence. It helped people to spread across the globe, build new communities, explore beautiful places and so on. But every advancement hits a breakeven point where it slowly deviates away from its sole purpose or the advantage it brings. In the world of transportation, it is the “congestion” which causes the sole purpose to breakeven. Across the globe, wherever there is a considerable advancement in transportation, people are experiencing “congestion” or “traffic jam”. It does not matter whether you own maruti, toyota, audi, bmw or lamborghini. It is the same hectic feeling when we hits within a traffic jam. It is not the car manufacturers who are responsible for this congestion. It is the people and their behavior along with inefficient traffic handling systems.

Traffic Congestions

Source: http://www.getgometro.com/causes-of-traffic-congestion-and-it-can-be-avoided/

Above figure showcases a typical (scary) traffic jam and by only looking at that figure, you will feel the pain. Vehicle manufacturers are trying to solve this problem through self-driving cars with more and more technical advancements. Even though it is a good move, it will not be the silver bullet for this complex problem. Companies like Uber are building systems which are more efficient in terms of vehicle utilization and professional drivers so that it will almost become another public transportation and people don’t want to bring their own vehicles. All these moves are really great and helping the congestion problem in different forms. Within this article, we are going to discuss about how to build an effective technology platform to improve the experience of people by providing necessary information to drivers, commuters, passengers and even vehicles to act in a manner which causes the least traffic congestion. Due to the complexity of the problem, the approaches describe here may not apply at the same efficiency everywhere. But this will provide a firm basis to build effective transportation systems.

Understanding the transportation ecosystem

One key thing to note here is that we are trying to build a reference architecture specifically for ground transportation. This does not discuss about over the air or naval transportation. There are 3 main sections in ground transportation.

On top of above 3 categories, we have supportive services like roadside maintenance and taxi companies like Uber which helps the system to run with better efficiency. These main stakeholders can be depicted using the below figure.

Main stakeholders of ground transportation ecosystem

Figure 1: Main stakeholders of ground transportation ecosystem

As depicted in the above figure, we can identify the following main stakeholders related to ground transportation.

Understanding the technical requirements

Prior to coming up with a technical reference architecture, we need to understand the main technical requirements of the ecosystem in a manner we can realize with real world products. All the stakeholders we have mentioned in the previous section are more or less deal with valuable information to improve their efficiency. In this section, we are going to identify the information (or data) flows within this ecosystem and how these stakeholders are consuming or producing these events. At a 33000 feet level, we can identify the below mentioned technical aspects.

The next level of technical requirements comes when the processed data is shared with other parties. Here we need to have the following capabilities

Reference architecture for a ground transportation system

With the identification of core technical requirements and capabilities for an efficient ground transportation system, it’s time to come up with a reference architecture for the solution.

Ground transportation system reference architecture

Figure 2: Ground transportation system reference architecture

As depicted in the above figure 2, sensors provides information about the current state of the system. This includes data about vehicle flow, commuter capacities at stations, current load of vehicles (in each compartment), vehicle locations, air quality indexes. These events can be processed in 2 places.

These results will be consumed by the actual users of the transportation system. The drivers can get notifications about current traffic condition as well as historical data to choose their travel times and routes. Commuters can see notifications about current vehicle locations, platform capacities, compartment level capacities, traffic conditions and plan their journeys so that they get a safer, comfortable travel. Traffic light system can improve its efficiency by understanding the current traffic flows and change its behavior accordingly (Adaptive traffic light system) Control centre can see the real-time wholistic view of the system and make better decisions accordingly Traffic police officers can operate with more awareness of the real-time traffic conditions and offer better service to the public

Realizing the reference architecture

Now we have an understanding about the problem and the high level solution. Let’s see how we can realize this reference architecture through a real product suite. According to the previous sections, we can identify 4 main capabilities which needs to realize this reference architecture.

There are many vendors who offers these capabilities through open source as well as proprietary software products. Instead choosing a polyglot type of model where you choose multiple vendors for different components, we are going to propose a single vendor who offers a complete open source platform with all the above mentioned capabilities. WSO2 offers 4 main products covering all the requirements mentioned in previous sections.

Reference architecture realized with WSO2 technology

Figure 3: Reference architecture realized with WSO2 technology

As depicted in the above figure 3, the required core capabilities can be realized with WSO2 product suite. One thing which is not mentioned in the above figure is the edge analytics capabilities of WSO2 Stream Processor where it can be deployed at the edge towards sensor aggregation points and filter events before sending over to the central processing layer. Also in addition to the email and queueing protocols, WSO2 SP can communicate results over other mechanisms like Kafka, HTTP, RabbitMQ as well. If someone wants to use other technologies for message queueing layer like Amazon SQS, WSO2 provides capabilities to integrate with that through connectors. In the above architecture, most critical component is the stream processing part where it needs to process millions of events within a given second. WSO2 SP has a scalable architecture starting from 2 node cluster which can handle 10K transactions per second on average.

Detailed technical reference architecture

When these different component connect with each other, they use different protocols, messaging formats and interfaces. Let’s take a look at which technologies we can use to realize this reference architecture.

Ground transportation technical reference model

Figure 4: Ground transportation technical reference model

The above figure depicts the relevant protocols, standards and messaging formats which are used to realize the reference architecture. Enterprise architects who needs to implement this type of a reference model can take their vendor selection decisions by using the technologies mentioned above. That makes this model independent from any one particular vendor. If someone wanted to build this system from scratch without using any existing products, they can do so by fullfilling the above mentioned technological requirements.

Summary

Building an effective ground transportation system will drastically improve the productiveness of that community. People wastes thousands of hours within roads due to inefficient ground transportation systems through “congestion”. In this article, we have defined a reference architecture for an effective ground transportion system by identifying the main stakeholders, key requirements, technical approach and a realization mechanism with real product suite. Even though we have used a specific vendor for the purpose of this article, you can realize the same reference architecture through other technology stacks as well.