ROBWARE » Blog » 3rd Year Project: First Meeting

Well after the most bullshit exam in the world I decided that it would be a good idea to go and see my project supervisor. As some of you already know, my supervisor is one Dr Robinson. My project is called "Road speed data mining".

First off, I'll describe to you what the outline of my project as set out in its specification:

"Fire brigades equipped with SEED Software’s mobile data terminals have the ability to track the position and speed of their vehicles as they travel to and from fires. This information is stored in a database. Over several years, this builds up to a large volume of data. The aim of this project is to write software to analyse this data to determine the typical speed that a fire engine can travel over each part of the road network. This will assist the fire brigades in making sure that when a fire occurs, the fire engines which can get there soonest are sent."

Now for some of you Games Development types, you may think this is boring. But I think that this is potentially very interesting. I find dealing with and analysing data, then representing it in a suitable way, to be very interesting.

Now in my meeting I found out that I'll be dealing with a lot of data; 5 years of data. This data is collected using a piece of hardware inside the fire engines themselves, and it gives information on things like the fire engines state (on the move, at the station, attending emergency, etc), speed, location, and other such wonderful goodies. So with this data I'll need to write a piece of software that will, at the very least, be able to analyse minimum, maximum, and average speeds across certain stretches of road. But if I'm really going to make this software shine; I'll have to take in to account different times of day, days of the week, seasons/time of year, and probably a host of other conditions. This project could prove to be a challenge, and a good one at that.

Also, Dr Robinson has a cool Lego fire station in his office, complete with fire engines, that has some awesome onboard electronics. I is jelly.