Monitoring of urban transportation networks using wireless sensor networks

Dissertação de mestrado, Engenharia Informática, Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia, Universidade do Algarve, 2015

Tese de doutoramento, Ciências Biomédicas, Departamento de Ciências Biomédicas e Medicina, Universidade do Algarve, 2015

With today’s technologies, constant growth of people in major cities and the permanent concern with our natural resources, such as energy, it is inevitable that we look for ways to improve our urban transportation networks. One way of improving transportation networks is to make an efficient vehicle routing. In this thesis vehicle routing with backup provisioning, using wireless sensor technologies, is proposed. We start by collecting the entry and exit of people inside urban transportations, which will give us a view of fleet load over time, using wireless sensor technologies. For this purpose a monitoring software was developed. Such data gathering and monitoring tool will allow data analysis in real time and, according to information extracted, to propose solutions for service improvements. In this thesis the possibility of using such data to plan vehicle routes with backup provisioning is discussed. That is, a variant of the open vehicle routing problem is proposed, called vehicle routing with backup provisioning, where the possibility of reacting to overloading/overcrowding of vehicles in certain stops is considered. After mathematically formalizing the problem a heuristic algorithm to plan routes is proposed. Results show that vehicle routing with backup provisioning can be a way of providing sustainable urban mobility with efficient use of resources, while increasing quality of service perceived by users. We expect this tool to be useful for the improvement of Urban Transportation Networks.