The Mobile Millennium project
Spanning 18 months, the Mobile Millennium project will design, test and implement a state-of-the-art system to collect traffic data from GPS-equipped mobile phones and estimate traffic conditions in real-time. It is a partnership between government, academia, and industry.
The Mobile Millennium project will demonstrate the first real-time permanent monitoring system capable of using GPS data from thousands of vehicles in a metropolitan area to construct velocity fields and travel time estimates. The system will be able to monitor not only freeways, but also arterials and secondary highways.
Design
The system will be scalable, require low bandwidth, protect the privacy of its participants, and have the highest quality of information when compared with existing systems of traffic monitoring.
Test Deployment
The Mobile Millennium project includes a six month pilot deployment of GPS technology, where thousands of GPS mobile phones will be placed in vehicle within a focus area. Participating users agree to place these cell phones in their vehicles in order to transmit positioning data. The phones receive live traffic information from a map application for free.