It struck me that the underlying theme of the conference could be described as ‘low risk innovation’.  An oxymoron?  At first glance, yes, but in this case it describes the cautious adoption of new technology while protecting existing investment.

The perception of the ITS industry, rightly or wrongly, has been one of an industry focussed on major manufacturing and hardware deployment projects, rather than software and new technologies. Therefore perhaps the industry hasn’t seen the level of growth and innovation that has occurred in other areas, telecommunications being a good example.  Or perhaps it simply hasn’t been possible until new technologies come along with a sufficiently compelling business case – lower cost solutions and faster to deploy.

New technology introduction – complementary and overlaid

GPS and Bluetooth featured strongly at the event on both the exhibition floor and in the breakout panel sessions.  It was clear however that the preference was to use these either as a proof concept across a small area, or where monitoring infrastructure exists, as complementary solutions, extending the accuracy and scope of existing fixed-road sensor deployments.

Software solutions and architecture

It was interesting how many of our booth visitors were initially attracted by SQLstream ITS Insight, but who were actually looking for more of a horizontal platform solution.  Yes, out of the box capability was important to get solutions up and running quickly, but wider concerns touched on some fundamental software engineering principles – openness, scalability and interoperability.

Open and flexible

The focus on manufacturing and hardware oriented projects tends to produce software support systems that are built to do just that – support the particular hardware installed for that project.  This leads to capable and often feature-rich systems, but systems that are difficult to extend and configure for new technologies and requirements.  There was a definite theme in the questions being asked at our booth for openness – open platforms, where an agency’s IT department, or consulting partner, can add new applications easily, and in fact are encouraged to do so.

Performance and scalability

Systems are required to scale in two ways.  The first is raw performance as the number of sensor events increases and real-time performance is required. Secondly, and perhaps less obvious, is that transportation agencies are looking to consolidate systems and provide common systems across multiple counties and even at the state level.  This highlights immediately the scalability issues with existing systems.   As the user base increases, the geographical scope of the system increases, and the drive for real-time information increases, the weakness of existing systems have been exposed.

Standards

The emergence of IT standards is a sure sign of increasing maturity in any industry.  This represents a move away from limited, siloed solutions to consideration of the wider integration issues – integration with network hardware, but also the integration between management systems.

A final word …

One final word, not quite a trend yet, but ITS appears to be embracing the Cloud as a solutions platform, as a mechanism for providing access to applications, but also for scalability and as a lower cost solution where large infrastructure deployment would be required.

A defining feature of the show is the Technology Showcase featuring  demonstrations from some of the technologies and applications that are bringing the future of transportation to life.  Each ‘village’ covers a specific theme such as Safety, Mobility, Environment/Sustainability and Pricing.  Environment/Sustainability focuses on the potential for reducing emissions.  Interesting demonstration offered by Imperial College, London, that will use a pollution sensor mounted on the roof of a demonstration vehicle travelling around the site.  Data is transferred over a GSM connection and viewed over the internet. Another is Ricardo Engineering’s demonstration of improving fuel efficiency using GPS navigation and traffic signal phase and timing data.

On the theme from yesterday of using simulators to demonstrate the benefits of technology, Toyota’s Star safety system is a star of the show – attendees get a spin in a off-road driving simulator, once with all electronic aids turned off, and once with traction control, stability control, brake assist and anti-lock braking turned on.

And for SQLstream’s day, another busy day with many questions and demonstrations of real-time traffic analytics and congestion detection with SQLstream ITS Insight.  Our core Stream-to-Business platform, and the ability to integrate and extend SQLstream ITS Insight easy and quickly, is generating significant interest.

The ITS World Congress claims to be the largest transportation event in 2011. Certainly the range of attendees and exhibitors is impressive, from software products to the latest in roadside hardware infrastructure. Some interesting themes emerging. Vehicle to vehicle communication is generating a lot of interest, and electronic driver aids. Some great simulators as well to amuse the attendees.

‘Real-time’ is also a common theme across the exhibition hall. And in particular the use of new technologies such as Bluetooth and GPS. Damian Black, SQLstream’s CEO, was speaking in a session today on how to achieve accurate arterial travel time. This is a hot topic right now, where existing in-road sensors are too expensive and the solutions too inaccurate. Bluetooth and GPS are the two emerging, although not necessarily competing, technologies – both can be used simulataneously to reinforce the other.

SQLstream in action – Day 1

It was great to have so much interest at the booth for our real-time intelligent transportation solutions. We announced the public launch of our SQLstream ITS Insight solution this morning. Perhaps we’re one of the few new companies at the show, but the ability to build real-time traffic analytics solutions based on maximizing the use of all available sensor data is generating a lot of interest.

SAN FRANCISCO, CA, October 17, 2011 - SQLstream Inc. today announced the public availability of SQLstream ITS Insight, the first real-time solution for reducing congestion to exploit low cost wireless GPS data as a complement to existing fixed-road sensor investment. Transportation Agencies are already benefiting already from SQLstream ITS Insight, using it to deliver real-time Travel Time and congestion detection solutions. The official public launch for SQLstream ITS Insight is today at the ITS World Congress, Orlando.

For commuters in their cars, traffic lines are lengthening and travel times are increasingly unreliable. Congestion is growing globally and transportation agencies are already struggling with their existing congestion management systems. Traditional approaches are expensive to install and maintain, and they provide very limited information and network coverage.

“Transportation Agencies are revolutionizing their approach to transport network management”, said Damian Black, SQLstream CEO. “SQLstream is delighted to be the core of their strategy for a single, real-time Intelligent Transportation platform.”

About SQLstream ITS Insight

SQLstream’s ‘Insight’ product range offers fast start solution packs for industry markets based on SQLstream’s core Stream-to-Business platform. SQLstream ITS Insight is a real-time traffic analytics and management platform for Intelligent Transportation agencies, offering real-time Travel Time, and sophisticated congestion detection algorithms that combine real-time and historical trend data. With SQLstream ITS Insight, transportation agencies will:

• Significantly reduce the cost of fulfilling congestion reduction targets
• Implement travel time improvements in just weeks rather than years
• Achieve the impossible – effective real-time insight for arterial routes

SQLstream will be presenting live demonstrations of SQLstream ITS Insight at ITS World Congress, Orlando, booth #1366.

About SQLstream Inc.

SQLstream’s Stream-to-Business platform analyzes real-time service and sensor data streams to deliver instant alerts, analytics and immediate answers to business decision makers. Using the industry standard SQL language, SQLstream executes queries on the wire, before data reaches the warehouse, enabling businesses to make smarter decisions sooner. SQLstream adds real-time operational intelligence, monitoring and control to existing systems while reducing total cost and complexity. SQLstream is headquartered in San Francisco, California and is on the web at http://www.sqlstream.com. For further information, please call Ronnie Beggs (877) 571-5775, or email pr@sqlstream.com.

Visit SQLstream on Booth #1366

Technology and innovation are central themes of this year’s ITS World Congress.  There’s been much written about the issues of congestion, green transportation schemes and improving personal mobility, not least in this blog.  At SQLstream we’ve been playing our part to help revolutionize the Intelligent Transportation industry.  It’s clear that the concepts of streaming data and real-time analytics are entering the main stream – from low level Big Data toolkits that require a streaming, low latency front end, to the real world of sensor networks and industries such as smart grid and telecommunications.

This is just as true in transportation.  Here we have an industry with vast volumes of sensor data, a need for sophisticated real-time analytics, and platforms capable of driving real-time process automation.  We’ve been working with a number of transportation agencies for some time, and are about to launch a new ‘Insight’ product for intelligent transportation.  Our ‘Insight’ range provides tools and out of the box support for specific industry verticals based on our core Stream-to-Business platform.

Google Earth Display for Road Traffic Congestion

For Intelligent Transportation this means processing sensor data from GPS and fixed-road sensors, to deliver applications such as real-time Travel Time, live congestion detection and network KPI reporting.

Should you be attending the ITS World Congress, we’d be delighted to see you on our booth (#1366) for a demonstration.

A streaming SQLstream application will feel very familiar to anyone with some basic knowledge of SQL and traditional RDBMS applications.  SQLstream uses standards-based SQL, except that streaming SQL queries run forever, processing data as they arrive over specified time windows.

This blog is the first in a series of tutorials for SQLstream developers, describing how to build a streaming SQL applications.  Over the coming months, these tutorials will address the different components of streaming data applications, and provide worked examples and guidance.

Streaming Visualization, Part 1: Setting up

We’ll begin the series by looking at a typical streaming use case – displaying real-time sensor data on a map.  We have a source of geo-located data flowing in SQLstream that we’d like to visualize. Using Google Earth and Ruby on Rails, I’ll demonstrate an easily-implemented solution with lots of room for expansion.

For this example, our approach is to connect the SQLstream pipeline to Google Earth using a staging database–a common deployment scenario. We’ll be using PostgreSQL for the staging database, but MySQL or any other database supported by Rails will work. A SQLstream pump will use TableUpdate to write a record of latitude, longitude, and description for each event to a display list in PostgreSQL. When Google Earth places a web request for data, Rails will service the request by rendering the contents of the display list as KML, Earth’s dialect of XML. We’ll start with SQLstream, Ruby, and PostgreSQL already installed and focus on what’s necessary to get them all talking to each other.

Getting the Data

With SQLstream installed, make sure all of the distributed plugins are installed (if you haven’t done this already) and start the server:

linux> cd $SQLSTREAM_HOME/plugin/autocp
linux> ln -s ../*.jar .
linux> cd $SQLSTREAM_HOME
linux> bin/sqlstreamd

We’re going to get our data from a web feed of recent earthquakes provided by the US Geological Survey. In another shell:

linux> cd $SQLSTREAM_HOME/examples/webfeed
linux> sqllineClient < webfeed.sql
linux> sqllineClient < usgs.sql

We now have several streams available to us within SQLstream, the one we want to visualize is SmallQuakesDay, which includes columns containing the location (‘point’ as lat/lon) and magnitude (‘mag’) of the quake.

Creating the Display List

We’ll use Rails to do all of the work of creating the display list. If you don’t have Rails installed yet, start by installing Ruby’s Gem package management system (in Ubuntu, this is the rubygems package). You’ll also need the development files for Postgres installed (postgres-server-dev in Ubuntu). You can now use gem to install rails and associated tools with this command:

linux> gem install mongrel rails pg rubyzip

I recommend that you add gem’s bin directory to your path (on my system it’s /var/lib/gems/1.8/bin) so that the commands ‘rails’, ‘rake’, and ‘bundle’ are found. Create an empty directory to work in (we’ll call it ‘$QUAKE’ here), cd there, and create a new rails server in the sub-directory ‘quakekml’ with these commands:

linux> cd $QUAKE
linux> rails new quakekml -d postgresql

You can test the server by starting it with these commands and visiting http://localhost:3000 in a web browser:

linux> cd $QUAKE/quakekml
linux> rails server

Use ^C to shut the server down so we can configure the database access. Edit the file $QUAKE/quakekml/config/database.yml, it should already contain sections describing the development, test, and production databases. Edit the username and password settings in each section to match a user you’ve configured in Postgres who can create databases. The only database we’ll be using is ‘quakekml_development’, but Rails will create all three when you issue this command:

linux> rake db:create:all

Create a display list consisting of a timestamp, lat/lon, and magnitude for each quake with the commands:

linux> rails generate scaffold quake_event when:timestamp lat:float lon:float mag:float
linux> rake db:migrate

You now not only have an empty table in Postgres, you also have a full web interface for viewing and editing that table. Start the server again and visit http://localhost:3000/quake_events to see it. Our next steps are to generate KML for Google Earth from this table, and to feed the table from SQLstream. The scaffolding created by Rails is a handy debugging tool we can use to inspect the table and manually add items to test the visualization.

Next time

Parts 2 and 3 of the visualization tutorial will be published over the coming weeks.  Part 2 focuses on how to render streaming analytics in Google Earth, and the final part of the tutorial will discuss how to get the data flowing.