An Early Alert System for Traffic Congestion based on Social Messages on Smartphones

Road traffic congestion is a global problem and large amount of money is being invested to cope with traffic congestion problems. These interventions focus on reducing traveler time on roads and highways in particular. Various approaches such as loop detection and automatic vehicle detection have been utilized for this purpose but all these happen to be very costly. The main purpose of this study is to propose a smartphone application through which users can share congestion information through social messages. This application is based on client-server architecture. On the client side, it gives traffic congestion information to the server; while on the reverse side, it takes information from the server and disseminates it to relevant users. A user searches for congestion information shared through social messages on a planned route in order to check if his path is clear or congested. In this way, the user can get timely be informed and thus be able to avoid that congested path and look for alternative routes.