On Tuesday, Ian Cassias defended his MS thesis. Ian worked in the field of telematics and he was interested in three topics: remote diagnostics of vehicles, vehicle fleet management and traffic monitoring.

My favorite part of Ian’s thesis is his work on traffic monitoring. Ian looked at how the police radar could be used to estimate traffic volume for a given segment of road and how fast the traffic is moving. In order to do this, Ian looked at the number of car velocity readings the radar reports, and the actual values reported. From these numbers he attempted to characterize road conditions along two axes: the slow-fast axis and the light traffic-heavy traffic axis. Ian’s pilot study shows that the police radar could very well be used to monitor traffic. If we can further develop this system we could make police cruisers into a set of roaming traffic probes. Data from the cruisers could be used for traffic prediction and, if wireless communication is available, for real-time traffic reports.

Nice work Ian!

Andrew Kun

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