SOUL-FI Floud
Traffic Flow Analysis in the Cloud
FLOUD is a mobile/web platform that provides analytics and insights about the flow of vehicles and people in smart cities and other urban environments such as commercial retail spaces.
While CHEST project allowed to prototype and validate the TrafficFlow sensors in a relevant environment, with many installations spread in the Metropolitan Area of Florence, during the SOUL-FI project the entire platform FLOUD has been completed and fully demonstrated in operational environment.
FLOUD was initially designed for application in modern smart cities, where the need of precise data about the movement of vehicles and people is increasing every year. Design of roads and crossings, heavy traffic measurement, detection of forbidden action, pedestrian crosswalk protection are examples of the typical use cases of the FLOUD platform. Later during the course of project SOUL-FI, thanks to meetings with stakeholders and dissemination activities, it was observed and assessed that the technology could also be adopted from actor in the retail, to support various tasks like for example:
- quantitative studies of how people move throughout retail stores and shopping mall over time
- analysis of people’s interest in physical marketing campaign
- select new retail location using pedestrians and vehicles flow data over time
- quantifying billboards impact on pedestrians and vehicles
At the conclusion of SOUL-FI project period, FLOUD allows analytics data collection and visualization of pedestrian and vehicle flows. It support the following key functionalities:
- Query and aggregation of sensors data via a map-based interface
- Trend analysis and historical data comparison
- Alert and scenario building model for predictive analysis
A key value proposition of FLOUD, is the ability to help organizations (cities, retailers) become smarter, without weighing too heavily on their budget. Unlike existing devices, FLOUD reduces the impact on infrastructure to a minimum, with small camera sensors that can be attached to existing infrastructure (e.g. public lamp posts) and even inside buildings.
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme for research, technological development and demonstration under grant agreement no. 632814.
