Details of Grant 

EPSRC Reference:	EP/C547632/1
Title:	A Transport Information Monitoring Environment (TIME): Event Architecture and Context Management (TIME-EACM)
Principal Investigator:	Bacon, Professor JM
Other Investigators:	Leslie, Professor I FitzGerald, Professor W Gibbens, Dr R Hopper, Professor A Mycroft, Professor A Moody, Dr KM
Researcher Co-Investigators:	Professor AR Beresford Dr RK Harle
Project Partners:	BT
Department:	Computer Science and Technology
Organisation:	University of Cambridge
Scheme:	Standard Research (Pre-FEC)
Starts:	01 October 2005	Ends:	31 March 2011	Value (£):	876,053
EPSRC Research Topic Classifications:	Mobile Computing Networks & Distributed Systems Software Engineering
EPSRC Industrial Sector Classifications:	Communications Transport Systems and Vehicles
Related Grants:	EP/C547640/2
Panel History:
Summary on Grant Application Form
Road congestion in the UK costs of the order of 20bn per annum. Also, 85% of senior business people believe that investment decisions are influenced by the quality of transport (CBI press release, Oct 2003). We believe that investment in monitoring, distribution and processing of traffic information will cause a substantial and significant increase in transport efficiency. This would not only improve business efficiency but would also have a profound effect on pollution control and social cohesion. In urban areas transport is the major source of pollutants including lead, nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide, sulphur dioxide, among others and road transport is the fastest growing source of UK emissions of carbon dioxide. But lack of a car can be socially excluding and good public transport is essential for social integration. Timely information is key to the acceptance of public transport.It is therefore vital that we improve the performance of the UK's transport networks (without incurring excessive costs) while balancing the needs for economic efficiency, social equity and environmental quality.A framework project (TIME) is planned for the city of Cambridge, an ideal choice because of its diverse economy (including a high-tech cluster of companies), variety of transport links and closeness to London. In the next decade Cambridge is projected to have 50,000 new jobs, 42,000 new homes, 36% increase in car journeys and 57% increase in public transport volume. Yet Cambridge already suffers traffic congestion.Existing traffic monitoring and information-service projects are developed individually, with vertical integration. We believe that a functional pinch point, by which we mean a narrow (therefore easy to use) interface, much like the delivery of IP packets in the Internet, will allow innovation in sensor development independent of applications, and will provide application developers a common, open interface on which to build that will be robust to changes in the underlying technology and that allows the gathered data to be shared in a controlled way. This functional pinch point is the event based middleware, together with the derived context models, such as road-junction visualisations, and their design and implementation lie at the core of this proposal. With such an infrastructure in place diverse applications can be developed through controlled subscription to the infrastructure services. No such infrastructure currently exists. An important aspect of the project is to achieve this while ensuring that the privacy of individuals is not violated, as required by law. There are many possible applications, including congestion detection and projection, car-park status, bus arrival time displays, empty taxi location, support for emergency services. No single application could afford to take this generic approach yet all will benefit from it. The algorithms developed for statistical analysis of data and inference of behaviour will also assist policy makers in long-term planning, for example on congestion charging.The goal of the project is therefore to investigate, design and provide a secure but open interface to support the controlled sharing of monitored data. The concrete outcomes of this work will be an event-based middleware that hides low-level sensor aggregation from applications, integration of highlevel context models with query support, and an evaluation of this support based on prototype but real-world applications that exploit the architecture.
Key Findings
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Potential use in non-academic contexts
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Impacts
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Project URL:	http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/time/
Further Information:
Organisation Website:	http://www.cam.ac.uk