Big data can be as valuable to organizations as gold was to 19th century American pioneers, but without the right tools, it can be overwhelming, arbitrary, and unactionable.
At INRIX we have built a business functioning as the pan in this gold rush, turning the promise of big data into insights that actually help our customers work faster, smarter, and more efficiently.
15 years ago, INRIX took billions of data points and turned them into real-time traffic conditions which, at the time was a groundbreaking replacement to the embedded sensors, cameras, and helicopters that had previously been used to report traffic. The old paradigms were expensive, hard to execute, and extremely limited in their ability to scale. INRIX had the idea (and data density) to use connected vehicle data to deliver real-time traffic on almost every road around the world.
What’s Next: INRIX IQ Signal Analytics
This year we’re leveraging big data to revolutionize traffic signal performance. With the release of INRIX IQ Signal Analytics, we’re able to change how traffic signal engineers approach their craft. Historically, measuring the performance of a signalized intersection required expensive hardware, lengthy timelines for installation, clunky data-storage, and manipulation, and after all this, you still got an extremely limited view of a road network. By leveraging billions of data points in near real-time, we’re able to dramatically expand the universe of what a city can understand about how its transportation network performs and reduce how much it costs to have this perspective.
INRIX IQ Signal Analytics, simply put, changes the game for cities. At more than 200,000 signals in the U.S. we can immediately deliver all the actionable information that a city needs to understand where signals are underperforming and target the intersections where funds spent on a redesign or retiming would have the biggest impact. This do-more-with-less approach is the hallmark of what being a “smart city” should entail. Now instead of taking months to instrument an intersection, a city can be up and running in hours. Instead of picking and choosing which signal’s performance should be measured, a city can keep tabs on the whole network. Instead of crunching numbers and sifting through data, a city can have all the key metrics they care about delivered to their inbox each morning for easy consumption.
The End Result
These new daily reports allow a user to quickly see the performance of their system as a whole as well as individual signals that warrant further inspection. We provide an intuitive, world-class interface to explore these daily reports, drill down into the daily performance (and historical trends) for individual intersections, and run custom reports through the Signal Analytics Intersection Analysis Module powered by the University of Maryland’s CATT Lab.
Much like at our outset, this most recent development is a giant leap forward for realizing the promise of big data in transportation. As was the case with our initial traffic offerings, our new Signal Analytics product not only harnesses the power of billions of connected vehicle data points but, most importantly, makes it easy for anyone to reap the benefits of these connected systems to make their lives easier and help our road networks be more efficient.
We can’t wait for you to try it out! Request a demo or sign up for a free trial.