Creative Commons

This thesis was written as a part of the MSc in ICT Systems at the International Hellenic University. At present, most road traffic monitoring systems utilize dedicated equipment such as cameras, loop detectors and radars that imply significant installation and maintenance costs. Furthermore, the majority of such equipment is fixed and cannot be dynamically relocated according to the needs. Last but not least, loop detectors are prone to errors leading to not accurate and unreliable acquired data. Global Positioning Systems (GPS) can obtain position and instantaneous velocity meas-urements of high accuracy that can be processed to obtain traffic information. Moreo-ver, with the use of mobile internet services, the acquired information can be distribut-ed, shrinking the cost of providing real time traffic information for the entire transporta-tion network. However, when dealing with GPS-enabled mobile devices, there are pri-vacy issues that have to be addressed, since the device is ultimately carried by a specific user. The scope of the current thesis is to describe, design and implement a real-time coopera-tive monitoring system and to assess the feasibility of such a system based on GPS-enabled phones and devices with network capabilities. The system consists of a mobile application for smartphones and of a web-based system management application. During this work a full functional mobile application was developed. The application is available on Google Play (Android Market) named as Drive In Crowd (DRinC). The concept of the app is based on the joint contribution of the community of users, with a common goal of improving the life quality of its members and for this reason it is distributed free of charge. The notion of “community project” and crowd sourcing pre-supposes the voluntary contribution of each member, nevertheless it requires a form of crediting those users who contribute, in contrast to those who simply use it; gamifica-tion is used as basic principle.