“Smart Dust”, IVHS, and Your Traffic in Real-Time

In the early ‘90’s, the hype comming out of the Intelligent Vehicle Highway System (IVHS) industry was a cadre of technological wizardry that would predict traffic flow, platoon vehicles entering congested highways, and monitor intersections from a "war room" command center. Many cities now have traffic centers but technology never quite made it to the motorist. That’s changing however with the advent of in-vehicle and personal navigation devices (PND) and broadcasting of real time traffic information.

INRIX, a company that specializes in predictive traffic modeling, announced that its approach to traffic flow monitoring was blessed by a Frost and Sullivan study as covering a wider area. It’s approach is called "smart dust" whereby it uses a network of GPS-equipped commericial fleets with whom they have a data exchange agreement. The fleets provide a historical record of speed and flow data and INRIX performs the predictive models. Now, INRIX is using the data to provide real time traffic information to its client base in more metropolitan areas than its main competitor, Traffic.com, according to the study.

The "smart dust" approach uses a 625,000 network of vehicles and unlike reports coming from local and state departments of transportation, which use in-pavement highway sensors, these vehicles are constantly moving and will send data from side streets as well as major traffic arteries. Hence, INRIX can cover a wider geographic area of secondary roads. INRIX expects that its information will be available on satellite radio and its historical data is being sought by navigation device manufacturers to "build in" predictive traffic information.