Geomatics for Mobility Management. A comprehensive database model for Mobility Management

In urban and metropolitan context, Traffic Operations Centres (TOCs) use technologies as Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) to tackling urban mobility issue. Usually in TOCs, various isolated systems are maintained in parallel (stored in different databases), and data comes from different sources: a challenge in transport management is to transfer disparate data into a unified data management system that preserves access to legacy data, allowing multi-thematic analysis. This need of integration between systems is important for a wise policy decisions. This study aims to design a comprehensive and general spatial data model that could allow the integration and visualization of traffic components and measures. The activity is focused on the case study of 5T Agency in Turin, a TOC that manages traffic regulation, public transit fleets and information to users, in the metropolitan area of Turin and Piedmont Region. In particular, the agency has set up during years a wide system of ITS technologies that acquires continuously measures and traffic information, which are used to deploy information services to citizens and public administrations. However, the spatial nature of these data is not fully considered in the daily operational activity, with the result of difficulties in information integration. Indeed the agency lacks of a complete GIS that includes all the management information in an organized spatial and “horizontal” vision. The main research question concerns the integration of different kind of data in a unique GIS spatial data model. Spatial data interoperability is critical and particularly challenging because geographic data definition in legacy database can vary widely: different data format and standards, data inconsistencies, different spatial and temporal granularities, different methods and enforcing rules that relates measures, events and physical infrastructures. The idea is not to replace the existing implemented and efficient system, but to built-up on these systems a GIS that overpass the different software and DBMS platforms and that can demonstrate how a spatial and horizontal vision in tackling urban mobility issues may be useful for policy and strategies decisions. The modelling activity take reference from a transport standards review and results in database general schema, which can be reused by other TOCs in their activities, helping the integration and coordination between different TOCs. The final output of the research is an ArcGIS geodatabase, tailored on 5T data requirements, which enable the customised representation of private traffic elements and measures. Specific custom scripts have been developed to allow the extraction and the temporal aggregation of traffic measures and events. The solution proposed allows the reuse of data and measures for custom purposes, without the need to deeply know the entire ITS environment system. In addition, The proposed ArcGIS geodatabase solution is optimised for limited power-computing environment. A case study has been deepened in order to evaluate the suitability of the database: a confrontation between damages, detected by Emergency Mapping Services (EMS), and Traffic Message Channel traffic events, has been conducted, evaluating the utility of 5T historical information of traffic events of the Piedmont floods of November 2016 for EMS services.