Study: mobile data adjusted bus routes in Africa

Study: mobile data adjusted bus routes in Africa

Researchers at IBM have adopted data thousands of cell phones to develop a model to improve the urban transport system in Ivory Coast, can save on travel time.

The research findings suggest new ways to allow urban planners use cell phones — expanding its reach in the continent of Africa — to design and improve infrastructure.

And research focused on the city of Abidjan, Ivory Coast's former capital and largest city, and an estimated population of 4.5 million. With 539 of buses, and 5,000 minibuses, and 11,000 taxi.

And IBM on its behalf AllAboard. Chosen from among 65 improvement possible for transportation in Abidjan. He suggested the form add two new destinations, and expand one existing destinations to improve the transport system, and provides 10% of travel time for passengers.

The search was based on the monitoring of population movements on the study of call records of about half a million randomly selected every two weeks between December 2011 and December 2012.

The data include time send and receive call or SMS message, save the communications tower, showing the approximate location of the user within the vicinity of the tower. When a person moves to another place and make calls are logged by new tower site.

Although data-like raw material, nor can it ensure that all passengers or use phones, it can extract tracks their movements through the sequence.

Says IBM that examined data for the first time used cell phones to improve the transportation network within the city, while previous studies used the data to infer the destinations and rates of application.

And thought Francisco kalabris, a researcher at the IBM laboratory in Dublin, one of the participants in the research, contemporary data about population movements, will lead to more effective results, allowing optimal road conversion and reduce travel time and waiting.

Oliver finds versher, Chief Scientist of IBM research laboratory in Dublin, the combination of mobile phone data with others can lead to a more sophisticated model: "if we can combine contact with City data such as bus schedules, we can change the existing network.

The search involved in the competition organized by the company "orange" to "communication for development" data Data For Development, which provided 2.5 billion of communications data for five million mobile phone in Ivory Coast, as much of this sort of data, has been revised to identify the users.

The competition aims to find innovative ways to meet the requirements of development. And research participation and announce the winner of the search Conference held at the Massachusetts Institute of technology between the first and third of May.

"IBM and other research groups participating to available data accurate enough to demonstrate population movements. It is expected that mobile data is contribute in many areas, adopted by the research groups to discover emerging ethnic conflicts by relying on records of the movements of the person and his dealings over the phone, as well as the expected population havens in the wake of natural disasters.

Mobile data represent a valuable opportunity for developing countries, with regard to the improvement of transportation systems, users of alhotf can support with global positioning system (GPS) applications such as "Google maps" sensor traffic services, while not available in regular phones in developing countries through telecommunications companies, and only in accordance with special arrangements.

Developed countries also use polls for travelers, which exceeds the physical capacity of the developing countries, the increasing use of mobile phones can take advantage of data in research.