TrafficWatch: Real-time Traffic Incident Detection and Network Monitoring Using Social Media

Social networks have become valuable source of real-time information for traffic. New South Wales (NSW) Transport Management Centre (TMC) has collaborated with NICTA to develop TrafficWatch, a system that leverages Twitter as a channel for transport network monitoring, incident and event management. This system utilises advanced web technologies and state-of-the-art machine learning (ML) algorithms. One of the issues identified was that only 3% of tweets contained geo-locations, making it difficult to interpret the locations of reported issues. TrafficWatch is able to geo-code an additional 20% of tweets by analysing locations extracted from its text analysis module. Findings from the pilot use of TrafficWatch at TMC demonstrated that it has potentials to report incidents earlier than other data sources, as well as identifying unreported incidents. The concept of monitoring social media also shows promise in improving TMC’s network monitoring capabilities and the abilities to assess network impacts of incidents and events.