ICommuter：For better city life
1 Background and significance Today cars, trains, bicycles and other traffic tools let people who live in the far quickly go and back from home to office, this process from home to workplace is called commuting. Commuting travel is the most basic and important urban residents travel, it affects all aspects of city life. Compared with other travel, commuting travel have greater constancy in time and space, whose schedule is to affect other activities of urban residents and their travel choices. In one sense, commuting activities are also the foundation of other activities. While commuting plays an important role in city daily life, it still exists a lot of problem. With the expansion of urban employment range, commuting travel not only increases rapidly in the number, but also becomes increasingly complex. Especially commuting trips focus on a certain area and certain peak periods and makes a sharp increase in road traffic. But the corresponding road capacity is limited, so traffic jams are resulted during morning and evening peak commuting periods, which greatly reduces the commuting efficiency. In addition, due to the huge commuter population in peak periods and limited transport carrying capacity, severe overcrowding inside the vehicle is resulted in, which will affect commuters’ commuting comfort to a large degree. In urban commuting process, apart from the traffic congestion caused by excessive traffic, there will be a variety of emergencies. If these incidents can’t be passed to the commuters timely, it will increase the burden on the crowded roads, causing more serious congestion and increasing the cost of commuting time. It is known from the above analysis that the city's commuters now face too much commuting problems. According to the above problems, our group members have developed a suitable commuting software for urban commuters, which can help travelers not only timely query commuter bus routes, commuter driving route, detailed taxi information, but also can query where exists danger driving situation in the current time on the road network and update dangerous information timely, so that remind drivers to choose the other way to avoid the dangerous driving. In addition, the software also adds such functions as finding nearby dining, shops and parking, which facilitate the daily life of commuters.
2 The working principle of ICommuter ICommuter consists of three parts: the PC side, the web server and the database PC side provides rich travel information to users with interactive interface, accept and feedback user's instructions in real-time. When users click on the relevant function, ICommuter transfer user data and function requests to the server via the carrier network and then users’ desired results are presented through Google Map server's network services, combined with the needs of users. When users use dangerous driving function, PC-side reads OpenXC data in the database. Then through driving behavior analysis algorithms based on OpenXC, PC-side calculates whether there is a vehicle in Aggressive state with driving range within three kilometers and then shows the results in the conduct on-board terminal map to warn the driver to take necessary precautions.
Figure 1 schematic diagram
3 Software introduction This software is designed for commuters to solve such problems during the process of daily commuting as route choice and parking difficulties. As an intelligence supporting software, it can bring convenience to daily commuting. The software is named ICommuter which has two layers of meaning. The first layer of meaning refers to the "I am a commuter" to illustrate that the subject application of this software is commuter. In the second layer of meaning, I is on behalf of the Intelligent, which means wisdom commuters to illustrate that the role of the software is to solve related problems in commuting intelligently. ICommuter’s concise, relaxed, stylish interface, convenient, quick, humanized operation and complete functions can bring users an unprecedented experience. 3.1 Software interface When the user completes the installation, click on the program to run ICommuter, then you can log in to the ICommuter display interface, which includes the following sections. In the upper left corner of the interface is the title bar which shows the name and icons of the software. In the upper right corner of the interface is the window control buttons, which in turn from left to right includes voice control button , window minimize button , and the window close button . The software provides voice broadcast function and after user open the software, the voice broadcast function is turned on by default. If user does not need voice broadcast, he or she can click on the voice control button to close the speech. To turn on voice broadcast function, please click on voice control button again. Below the title bar is the interface navigation bar. The system provides a variety of navigation services for long-distance commuters in the interface navigation bar, including such function as map zoom in or out, location information query, car route enquiries, public transit enquiries, flight routes enquiries, taxi service, nearby dangerous driving avoiding, food search, shop search and parking search. Below the navigation bar is the map display interface. When the user enters the system interface, Shanghai Oriental Pearl TV Tower will be loaded by default as the center of the map. Real-time date, time and weather condition of Shanghai will be displayed on the right side of the map, including weather conditions, the lowest and highest temperature and wind speed, etc. In the bottom of the service interface section column, the latitude and longitude information of user's mouse on the map will be displayed in real time. Interface display as shown in Figure 2.
Figure 2 user interface display
3.2 The software function and role ICommuter has combines huge amounts of geographic information, weather information, bus information, parking information and store information with powerful commuter query function. ICommuter includes basic function and characteristic function. Basis function involves zoom function, location information query function, car driving route query function, public transit route query function, taxi route query function, etc.; Characteristic function contains dangerous driving avoiding function, food and store query function, parking lot query function, the flight path query function, etc. 3.2.1 Basic function ① Zoom function Zoom of the map is the essential basic functions of map service for commuters. Users can complete this function by clicking on amplification and narrow button on the navigation bar. In addition, sliding the mouse wheel can also zoom the map. ② Location information query function With the continuous development of social economy, urban form is gradually changing and cities’ internal structure are becoming more and more complicated. In the cities, commuters don’t know the detailed information of city location. When commuters need to go to an unfamiliar place, they can use the location information query function in ICommuter. When users want to know more details about the specific location of the city, he or she can click on the "Location" button on the navigation bar. By entering the right address users want to know on the right side of the dialog box and click on the "GO" button, the map will automatically mark the position of the query and detailed information. ③ Car route query function In urban commuting behavior, some commuters drive to work for the convenience. However, in the cities the route from origin to destination is not the only one, how to choose a suitable driving route to makes commuting the most efficient is the most concern of commuters. Icommuetr has solved this difficult problem for commuters. By clicking on the "Driving" button on the software and entering the origin and destination, it will recommend a reasonable driving route for the users automatically. ④ Public transit routes query function The majority commuters will choose public transport as the first choice when they travel. ICommuetr software provides a comprehensive set of public transport routes. When users click on "Bus" button and fill in departure and destination, then click on "Search" button, the software will show users an accurate public transport route. ⑤ Taxi route query function When commuters choose taking a taxi as their way to travel, they often want to know the price it takes in advance. Here ICommuetr software not only provides the accurate route when taking taxis, but also provides the distance of the route, travel time and travel prices. 3.2.2 Characteristic function ① Flight Routes query function Here we hope that in the future society aircraft will bring commuters for long-distance travel in big cities huge help, aircrafts are able to move in the corners of the city in straight line. On this basis, we presents a kind of aircraft flight route which will help commuters to reach the destination quickly and directly. It is a vision of the future traffic presented by our group. And now, although there is no specific kind of flight transport, it can be used as an interface to traffic later. ② Dangerous Driving Avoiding Function With large dense and mixed vehicles in urban roads, there will be drunk driving, fatigue driving and other dangerous driving, which make the urban road traffic exists all kinds of hidden safety dangers. If real-time vehicles traveling data collected by openxc data can be used, we can analyze drivers’ driving behavior and then judge whether there is dangerous driving vehicles in nearby places. This function is mainly used as a test to provide relevant ideas for developers. ③ Parking search function Commuters who drive their cars to reach the destination, they often encounter the problem that can’t find parking area. Then commuters urgently need to know the location of parking within the vicinity of the destination range. In ICommuter commuters parking confusion is specially taken into account. With the function of parking search, commuters no longer have distress to find parking spot. ④ Food and stores search function The process of travel is often accompanied by various travel needs, such as shopping, meals, etc. They not only want to know relevant information of commuting routes, but also want to know food and store near the route. ICommuetr provides a convenient and fast food and stores search function for travelers.
4 Application prospects and outlook The 21st century is the important period of urban development, Shanghai as the political and cultural center of China has attracted a lot of people to come to work, which leads to Shanghai urban population increasing year by year, as shown in table 4-1.
Table 4-1.Shanghai resident population and population density
In the process of urban development, Shanghai’s population increases rapidly, its urban traffic is also constantly developing, one of the most obvious performance is that the number of individual civilian vehicles is increasing, as shown in table 4-2.
Table 4-2 Shanghai personal civilian vehicle ownership(2010～2012)
Through the above analysis we can see that both urban population and individual civilian vehicle ownership show increasing trend year by year. From a certain extent, it reflects the increasing urban traffic pressure. The increase of the traffic pressure will directly cause difficulties to commuting.
In addition, it can be seen from the Shanghai business parking lot operating conditions (such as table 4-3) that number of stops increases at a speed 15 million a year .It also suggests that commuters’ parking difficulty is bigger and bigger.
Table 4-3 Shanghai business parking lot operating conditions(2010～2012)
ICommuter is dedicated to solve the difficulties encountered in commuting. It has very strong practicability and humanization. Considering the need of daily life and shopping, ICommuter also adds food and store query function. Moreover, on the basis of solving the existing commuting problems, ICommuter also takes the possible future (aircraft) transportation route query into account, which is very proactive.
The current development of ICommuter software is based on Windows environment. In the future it will be expanded to the car terminal, more convenient and quickly. It can be seen that ICommuter has strong market prospects and development space, which is worthy of popularization and application.
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