A system for determination of zones of reach taking into account traffic jams

Situation

For the purpose of expansion of opportunities of use of statistical information on traffic of Great Britain the Customer made the decision on application programming allowing to define reach zones for a certain period. The main advantage of this application selected an opportunity to obtain information taking into account traffic jams on different roads which change depending on a day of the week and time of day.

Solution

Specialists of Aplana company created the unique solution which makes calculations of isochrones (isochrones are the areas equidistanted on time from a start point) and represents them on the card. In calculation such parameters as, a start point, time of day, a day of the week and time wishing to spend on the road are used. Development of an algorithm of calculation of time was an uncommon task. The complexity consisted that time for passings of each segment of a way changes depending on time of day and a day of the week, thus, implementation of the search algorithm of the fastest way using the dynamic data changed in the direction of travel was required. The volume of statistical data - 20 GB was other complexity. It was initially planned that data processing was made on the customer's server for some time and then went to the user by mail.

As a result specialists of Aplana developed the most difficult algorithm which processes the large volume of the data collected from different sources in real time. Display of the card and isochrones are implemented using MS Virtual Earth and MapPoint Server technologies.

Creation of this solution became possible thanks to active use of technologies Microsoft. As the main building tool Visual Studio integrated environment 2005 Team Edition which in a tandem with Team Foundation Server at the expense of developed the in_trumentariya significantly simplified as directly system development, and project management was selected.

The website implemented on ASP.NET with primeneniym AJAX acts as the user interface of a system. And also, for visualization directly of cards and isochrones Virtual Earth and MapPoint Server were used.

A set of the WEB SERVICES based on WCF is the cornerstone of a system thanks to what the core of a system has high integrability (for example, perhaps direct use of functions of a system by storonny developers) and configurability. In particular, a system for access to the functions uses such transports as HTTP, TCP and MSMQ.

For storage of statistical data a system uses SQL Server 2005 allowing quickly and effectively (due to close integration with development tools) to get access to tables some of which contain more than 300 million records. Feature of the project was the fact that the customer provided input data in the form of the csv set of files which format several times changed. Will cope with loading and data-refresh SQL Servers Integration Services very much helped with such conditions.

And, of course, availability of detailed documentation and the accumulated world experience of development using technologies Microsoft played not the last role in success of the project.

Advantages

The solution developed by specialists of Aplana company on technologies Microsoft is demanded as in the field of B2C, and B2B. Residents of Great Britain can save time and money for the road when changing work location or the place of a zhitelelstvo, traveling around the country or holding business meetings in different parts of Great Britain.

In B2B this system attracts interest in the following spheres:

• Transport and logistic companies, large retail networks. Using the application they can calculate optimal routes of the movement of cargo transport, provide their following according to the diagram and thus guarantee timely cargo delivery, reduce delivery costs.
• Travel agencies will be able to insure group excursions from dead time of tourists in traffic jams and also to offer additional service for the optimal choice of a route to clients who prefer to an individualn_a routes of travel.
• Real estate agencies can increase quality of the offered services, and respectively the market value due to inclusion of additional service when choosing the residence or lease of office.