• February 05, 2016

    INRIX Interested in PacTrans STAR Lab DriveNET Platform for Big Data Analysis

    Inrix

    Last week Monday, January 25th, Dr. Yinhai Wang, along with several other PacTrans and STAR Lab researchers met with a group from INRIX. INRIX is a global Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) company that provides a breadth of Internet services and mobile applications pertaining to road traffic and driver services. INRIX provides historical, real-time traffic information, traffic forecasts, travel times, travel time polygons and traffic count to businesses and individuals in over 40 countries worldwide. Headquartered in Kirkland, WA, they collect trillions of bytes of information.

    With that much data, traditional data analysis platforms such as excel and .R, just won’t cut it. Thus, INRIX has recently begun exploring what it might look like to partner with STAR Lab. This is because the STAR Lab has developed a much stronger platform called DRIVENet. Funded by WSDOT, Digital Roadway Interactive Visualization and Evaluation Network (DRIVENet) is an on-line transportation platform aimed at data sharing, integration, visualization, and analysis. The system provides users with the capability to store, access, and manipulate data from anywhere as long as they have Internet connections.

    So what does each group get from a partnership? INRIX gets an intelligent, transportation-oriented (temporal and spatial), data platform for all of its trillions of data points. STAR Lab, PacTrans, and the University of Washington get trillions of new anonymous data points, from which to engage in countless new research endeavors, building new travel models, travel time reliability, and level of service indices.

    Nothing is set in stone yet but we are excited for the possibility of partnering with one of the biggest transportation data collectors in the world.