Data Archiving and Reporting

Regional Archive Data Server (RADS)

OZ Engineering is developing a regional archived data server to assimilate traffic data from numerous transportation agencies spread across the Phoenix Metropolitan area. This project involves collecting real-time and batch-generated system data from multiple traffic control systems, databases, and platforms within different cities and government agencies. A significant challenge in this project has been to integrate the various systems without compromising the security requirements imposed by each IT department. The resulting regional archive generates charts, graphs, and reports available to authorized users on the Internet.

The sheer volume of traffic data (ranging in terabytes per year) has required that data warehousing concepts be implemented. The total data archived and processed is in excess of a terabyte per year.

RADS is designed to meet several challenges beyond those typical of transportation database management systems:

• archive a lot of detailed data for an indefinite time period.
• provide a short-delay pipeline for use by near-real time ITS and traffic forecasting applications.
• incorporate new data record and entity types with minimum difficulty and special programming.
• avoid reliance on proproetary hardware, software, or protocols.
• respect more stringent data ownership, privacy, and security concerns that have arisen since the 9/11 attacks.
• server a wide range of potential future users and needs.

RADS is compatible with national ITS architecture, data archiving standards, and data registries. This innovative system was developed using completely open source technologies including CORBA, J2EE, Java based web services, Java web frameworks, MySQL and JDBC, to provide storage and complex analysis of traffic data.