An OLAP-based Decision-making Support Technology For Transportation Management

Transportation management department has the responsibility for ensuring safety to prevent human injury or loss of life. However, the long low-level informationization in operation department, lack of advanced technology backup has resulted in the failure to embark on many decision-making.With the development of GPS application in transportation management, large quantities of consistent data from the commercial vehicles equipped with GPS receiver has supplied basis for the administration department's obtaining of valuable information. The research described in this paper focuses on further analysis of data from GPS equipped commercial vehicles based on the application of OLAP technology. With assistance of the analysis, the management department can enforce the safety management effectively, for the purpose of improving the level of management.OLAP is a kind of technology which can give support to complex analyzing work, display data from multi-layer and multi-aspect and emphasize particularly on decision support. Initially, the theories and technologies which relate to OLAP are discussed in this paper, such as data warehouse, multidimensional data model and MS Analysis Services. On the basis, a general solution to OLAP system for transportation safety management is presented according to the application state and the environment of software and hardware. It is based on the monitoring information of commercial vehicles from GPS monitoring system and the basic information owned by operation and management sectors. And the design idea, system structure, working principle, characteristics as well as the key technology of the solution are included and explained in detail.Aiming at the key problems which need to be solved in the general solution, a universal data extractor is designed in the article in terms of the current data environment and data traits of the transportation management sectors. In the preprocess of the data, large emphasis is put on the analysis of the characteristics of the GPS positioning data and the road network which the commercial vehicles equipped with GPS devices transit on, the result of which can be taken as the criterion of the road subsection. On the basis, a spacial data preprocess method based on the nearest point estimation map-matching is put forward. Furthermore, the data granularity is discussed, and the star-snowflake model of the data warehouse is constructed and physically realized. In addition, OLAP database with each analysis dimensionality and data cube is schemed out.After the standardization and formatting of the data is completed, a data analysis engine based on MDX is designed to achieve the alternation of the data and users. Eventually, aiming at the performance bottleneck produced in the process of the system design, this paper introduces a series of ways to optimize performances, which turned out to have improved the comprehensive performances for 3 to 4 times through experiments.Finally, OLAP system for Chongqing City's roadway transportation safety management is developed and realized with the application of the achievements in the above research, using the vehicle alarm data collected by the GPS monitoring system in Chongqing. This system is of significance in supporting the improvement of the scientificity in actual transportation management and decision-making.