Goutam Chakraborty

Affiliation: Professor, Intelligent Informatics Lab, Faculty of Software and Information Science, Iwate Prefectural University, Japan

 

Title: An Intelligent Route Recommendation System That is Robust to Emergency Situations and Supports User’s Intention

ABSTRACT

Though recent applications support route recommendation which would avoid sections of the road network with heavy traffic, there is a considerable delay for the road status information to reach the user’s device, like a smart phone. When there is an emergency situation, like earthquake, tsunami, or flooding and landslide, a delay in information dissemination over the whole road network would create a domino effect and the traffic system will be in deadlock. Similar situation arises in case of popular festivals or open concerts take place in big towns. As the traffic suddenly increases on specific links, quick information dissemination is only one aspect to distribute the traffic and avoid deadlock.

When viewing from the user side, there is another important aspect. Here, the drivers need special support for navigation. In conventional route recommendation or car navigation system, the user specifies the destination. The shortest route from present location to the destination is recommended. Under emergency as well as in many real-life situations, the driver may not know the exact destination, but could express it by required characteristics. After receiving tsunami alarm, the driver need to be navigated to any shelter, which is still serviceable and in shortest time. Or she/he may be looking for “a parking place near the railway station with empty slots.” More than one destinations may satisfy driver’s intention. Thus the navigation system should support multiple destinations. In addition the requirements may include contradictory optimization criteria – like nearest and cheapest etc. While calculating the optimum route, criterion like minimum delay is more important that minimum distance. In addition, the system should support traffic distribution in such a way that there is no congestion on any section of the road-network.

Short Bio

Prof. Goutam Chakraborty received his Ph.D. in 1993 from Tohoku University, Japan. Before joining Tohoku University, he worked in Telecommunication Industry in India. Presently he is Professor and head of the Intelligent Informatics laboratory, Department of the Software and Information Science, Iwate Prefectural University, Japan. His research interests are Soft Computing algorithms and their applications to solve pattern recognition, prediction, scheduling and optimization problems including applications in wired and wireless Networks. Recently, he is interested in the analysis of various time-series signals, collected by sensors from Human body as well as machines.