Today transport networks are the essential element of any major city and monitoring traffic is important for many technical reasons. It allows for better design of future roads and assessment of the state of current roads. The number, size, weight, and speed of vehicles control deterioration rate. Also, real-time information supplies data to intelligent information systems to help control traffic.
The possible solution for getting that kind of big data about the traffic is to use distributed acoustic sensing with fiber optic cable networks. The fiber optic cable networks cover almost all parts of cities and road infrastructures. Besides, as fiber cables are already in place, there is no need for the installation and additional works such as digging up the streets, fitting sensors.
DAS has been proposed as a means of monitoring traffic on highways and there are many applications in this field, such as simply detecting whether traffic is moving and deducing the speed of vehicles, or in weigh-in-motion applications, i.e., estimating in real time whether each vehicle is within the allowed weight and weight per axle.
The principle of work is based on the ability of all traffic to generate acoustic or seismic data. To give an example of some specific activities that generates those signals, road accidents create certain acoustic signatures and these acoustic vibrations pass through fiber optic cables. The distributed acoustic sensing allows interpreting this acoustic information to recognize, determine, and track these signatures for accidents, traffic flows and public transport infrastructure monitoring in real-time.
FOTAS includes an artificial intelligence module to provide diagnosis as well as detection. Owing to this module, the system classifies the received signals with 95% accuracy. FOTAS can be integrated with other security solutions via SMTP, SDK, .net dll, REST API, Trigger, Dry Contact.
The effectiveness of such monitoring can be measured by the time difference between the moment of occurrence of events and the moment of detection, diagnosis, reporting and intervention. The use of the Fiber Optic Distributed Acoustic Detection System (FOTAS) in integration with the camera, security software, mobile device and drone aims to minimize this time difference. It helps to make the right intervention (fire brigade, ambulance, law enforcement, etc.) at the right time.