December - 2006

Building ground plans made simple

Location is one of the greatest challenges confronting mankind. Efforts to pinpoint one’s location precisely have spawned several ground-breaking developments in surveying and navigation technologies. Even in our highly complex, modern world, it continues to play an important role in numerous human activities like travelling, traffic management, vehicle navigation, aviation, mapping etc. Many types of location-based services, propelled by different techniques, are in vogue today. The revolutionary space geodetic system, global positioning system and more recently, the global navigation satellite system, have taken these services to a new high.

Location-based services
Location-based services have become one of the essential infrastructural components needed for the development of a country. Vehicle Guidance Systems (VGS) and Intelligent Vehicle-Highway Systems (IVHS), which are a part of these LBS, play a vital role in the efficient transfer of men and materials from their point of origin to destination. They ensure minimum delays and save time by prescribing the shortest travel paths. Currently, VGS are being used effectively for innumerable purposes in various fields, departments and organisations. The rail and road transportation departments of different countries use these guidance systems for efficient fleet management and public transport. In the modern scenario, traffic problems are increasing rapidly. Especially in India, where travel demand and travel density are both pretty high, the accumulating traffic creates a wide range of problems like traffic congestions, traffic jams, delays in travel time etc. Delay in travel time depends on several factors, including internal and external. Internal factors are those, which are governed by the user, like maintenance of the vehicle, mode of travelling, routine travel speed, road chosen by the user etc. External factors comprise traffic jams, traffic congestion, accidents etc. These two kinds of factors are interdependent and cause physical as well as mental effects on the user, which are harmful. Besides, if travel time is reduced by some means, it will help create a positive work-environment. There are various ways to shorten the travel time like decreasing traffic congestion, reducing traffic jams, preventing accidents etc.

If a traveller is informed of an accident or traffic jam before he gets stuck in the chaos, he will be able to choose an alternative path to reach his destination within the stipulated time. For this purpose, if one has a data base map, which shows all possible paths between origin and destination, the accident position and the position of the vehicle, the user can easily judge the alternate paths to reach the destination swiftly and peacefully. Besides the display of the shortest path between the origin and destination, eases the job. If any person is new to a place and doesn’t know the route, but only the name of the destination, a guidance system will come to his rescue by showing all possible paths and also the shortest path. The same guidance system can be used by the tourism department. With such guidance systems, tourists can be guided to their destinations without manual help. This gives the tourists a comfortable and pleasant travelling experience and helps in attracting many foreign tourists, thus developing tourism and increasing the inflow of foreign exchange and financial revenues. It can be stated with sufficient confidence that ‘a GPS-GIS integrated technique is most suitable to develop such a vehicle guidance system.’