City of Dublin Uses IBM's Big Data to Improve its Public Bus Transportation Network and Reduce Congestion

One of the main problems that modern day cities face is traffic congestion that hampers the easy flow of commutation. To get over the traffic congestion problems, the city of Dublin, Ireland, has trusted Big Data that will help the city to recognize and solve the root causes of traffic congestion in its public transport network.

Catering to 1.2 million citizens with housing, water and transport services, the Dublin City Council (DCC) has been planning efficiently to keep the city moving. In addition, the council's traffic control center works together with local transport operators to manage an extensive network of roads, tramways and bus lanes.

The city council was looking out for an innovative solution that would motivate economic activity and meet the challenges of a globally competitive city for the future. The city council later collaborated with IBM (News - Alert) researchers to bring ease in its road and traffic.

The new partnership with IBM is helping the city’s road and traffic department to syndicate Big Data streaming in from an array of sources including bus timetables, inductive-loop traffic detectors, and closed-circuit television cameras, GPS updates that each of the city's 1,000 buses transmits every 20 seconds.

The city is also able to generate a digital map of the city draped with the real-time positions of Dublin's buses using stream computing and geospatial data.

"Until recently we had a fragmented view of the overall health and real-time status of Dublin's transport network, making it very difficult to identify traffic congestion in its early stages because the causes of a delay had often moved on," said Brendan O'Brien, Head of Technical Services, Roads and Traffic Department at Dublin City Council. "As a result of the research collaboration, we now have a better idea of how multiple data can be merged from across different sources and the IBM Research prototypes show what can be achieved in this area."

IBM works through its research lab in Dublin that primarily focuses on cities and advancing science and technology for intelligent urban and environmental systems through Big Data, analytics and optimization.