Texas-based transportation equipment manufacturer Trafficware, which operates within the Cubic Corporation’s Transportation Systems (CTS) business division, has announced a significant national expansion of the TidalWave service that it operates with partner SWIM.AI.
Introduced a year ago by Trafficware and SWIM.AI, a Silicon Valley-based supplier of enterprise software solutions, TidalWave is a live traffic and traffic management information service powered by edge computing and machine learning. Currently nine cities and counties across the USA use TidalWave including: Las Vegas (Nevada); Palo Alto (California); Greensboro (North Carolina); Oklahoma City (Oklahoma); Jacksonville and Gainesville (Florida); Norwalk (Connecticut); Prince Georges County (Maryland); and Clark County (Washington). More than a dozen other cities are also in the process of deploying TidalWave.
Currently, most routing and logistics applications rely on historical cellular GPS data to measure roadway congestion and estimate travel times. In order to determine traffic congestion on arterial corridors, the applications assume that all cell phones are located in moving vehicles and reflect current conditions. The speed and accuracy with which the data is collected, analysed and made available is significantly delayed and often does not reflect the actual experience of drivers. Co-developed by Trafficware and SWIM.AI, TidalWave provides superior delivery of high resolution and accurate live data for city intersections and traffic locations, delivering results in less than a second after actual intersection changes. This immediacy enables optimal vehicle routing using actual intersection/light behaviour and traffic locations, including forward predictions of future behaviour.
TidalWave was designed using a software architecture that combines advanced traffic management technology, the speed and power of edge computing, and instant local analytics to deliver real-time data and predictive machine learning for the transportation market. The SWIM DataFabric technology stack that underpins the TidalWave service delivers unprecedented performance for traffic data processing in real-time, operating at a fraction of the cost of traditional systems and delivering real-time information to city services and third-party applications.
To achieve high performance and low latency, the software locally analyses data, creates live digital twins of every junction, and reduces the raw data volumes by a factor of over 1,000. Performing analysis locally in the city, whether at the central ATMS or on controllers at street level, enables the system to achieve massive infrastructure cost savings. In addition, the service generates new revenues for the city by making data and insights commercially available in real-time to third parties such as navigation applications, vehicle owners, logistics businesses and connected cars.
“TidalWave was designed to address a variety of real-time traffic applications including connected vehicles, smart cities and Internet of Things (IoT) markets,” said Joe Custer, vice president and general manager of Trafficware at CTS. “The speed at which we capture and report traffic/intersection data is incredibly valuable to cities and counties, so it is gratifying to see it expand so rapidly.”
Ramana Jonnala, chief executive officer of SWIM.AI, commented, “DataFabric can analyse, learn and predict in real-time, making TidalWave incredibly powerful and accurate. Its ability to work on existing hardware and deliver precise, granular traffic and intersection data instantly in some of the most congested, highly trafficked cities is extremely valuable.”
