The biggest inhibitor for smart traffic management is not the opportunities, we all know the opportunities. Better traffic flow, less pollution, less waste. The opportunities create better lives for city dwellers and city visitors alike.
So why is it not here? Well, smart traffic is based on a constant data flow from every intersection in a city so that data can be processed and in an ultimate scenario, the result is returned to control for example the traffic lights. If AI can now recognize faces and sort millions of data points per second this can not be that hard to do?
Well, here is the thing, each intersection will, whether there is traffic or not, be generating huge amounts of data, and that data needs bandwidth to be moved to a cloud provider's servers. The intersection data will be arriving from thousands of intersections every second, and then this data will have additional costs with the AI computing to extract the information from the AI.
As traffic, for the most part, of a 24-hour cycle, runs smoothly this is an extremely wasteful solution, not just from a cost perspective but from a sustainable computing point of view.
The Internet of Everything solution
The Internet of Everything solution is based on Data 2 Information refinement happening in tiers. So an intersection does not just push any data it generates, instead, that data is generated into useful information before it leaves the intersection. This is so that the data from an empty intersection is not competing for computing power with an intersection where there has been an accident.
Sustainable computing is not just a principle to lower pollution, sustainable computing is cost-effective, more efficient, and stable than any cloud solution can ever be.
