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Discussion on: How IoT became a one stop solution for Transportation industry?

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Scott Simontis

As someone who worked in the traffic and transportation industry, I'm skeptical of some of your claims. The parking lot solutions are pretty nifty, I'll give you that. Data logging for fleet vehicles is a lot easier. But the infrastructure itself is still pretty screwed up.

Traffic lights have had the ability to network with each other and transmit traffic data for at least 10 years, so in theory you could modify light timings to an optimal case where you avoid the "convoy effect" where you end up with the same group of vehicles at every light, all equally impeded by traffic devices instead of traffic itself. But no one has figured out a solid way to build an optimal algorithm to synchronize everything. I imagine it's because so much specialized knowledge is required and the industry is all proprietary technologies, most of the business opportunities are writing protocol translators to make devices compliant with the NTCIP standards that the federal DOT designed...basically a set of data points and state machines a device must implement to be considered compliant, sent via SNMP messages in earlier versions or now XML.

The security of all of those devices is very, very concerning, and that's all I am going to say about that matter.