Road traffic analysis and agile architectures

Kristoffer Dyrkorn outlines an infrastructure that reduces the steep cost of road construction and maintenance. The system provides high-quality and near real-time information by integrating an unusual combination of sensors, devices, protocols, and software. Kristoffer discusses architectural challenges met and choices and mistakes made while trying to keep the architecture receptive to change.

The construction and maintenance of roads is expensive. Metrics such as traffic speeds, volumes, patterns, and trends heavily influence how roads should be built and maintained. Improving the data quality of your metrics means you can plan and execute roadwork more efficiently. Kristoffer Dyrkorn outlines an infrastructure consisting of distributed sensors and signal processing devices, a data-ingestion application, and a NoSQL database optimized for analytics. The system registers information about vehicles passing measurement stations located along major roads and provides continuously updated reports and low-latency traffic event information. While building the system and integrating it with an increasing number of measurement stations, Kristoffer and his team encountered a wide variety of architectural challenges due to a very diverse technology stack, a need for continuously cost-effective scalability, and a desire to keep the architecture simple and agile. Kristoffer discusses some of the challenges his team met, provides the reasoning behind the choices they made, and covers the project’s outcomes—positive and negative, intended and unintended, and direct and subsequent. Topics include: