Dynamic spatio-temporal integration of traffic accident data

Up to 50% of delay in traffic is due to non-reoccurring events such as traffic accidents. Accidents lead to delays, which can be costly for transport companies. Road authorities are also very interested in warning drivers about accidents, e.g., to reroute them. This paper presents a novel and efficient approach and system for uncovering effects from traffic accidents by dynamic integration of GPS, weather, and traffic-accident data. This integration makes it possible to explore and quantify how accidents affects traffic. Dynamic integration means that data is combined at query time as it becomes available. This is necessary, because data can be missing (weather station down) or late arriving (accident not officially reported by the police yet). Further, the integration can be parameterized by the user, e.g., distance to accident, which is important due to inaccuracy in reporting. We present the integrated data on a map and show the effectiveness of the integration by allowing users to interactively browse all accidents or pick a single accident to study it in very fine-grained details. Using information from 31 433 road accidents and 38 billion GPS records, we show that the proposed dynamic data integration scales so very large data sets.