This week has been extremely busy and productive for us. We were in a bit of a rut during the first week because of our lack of experience with QGIS and Leaflet, as well as confusion on the project direction. We are just starting to get the hang of things this week—settling in and learning the ropes of these new applications (and learning new languages for some of us!). Our first meeting of the week with our mentor, Dr. Angshuman Guin further clarified some of our initial stumps.
The main short-term goal right now for our CDS team is to generate a visualization (mainly a heatmap) with the first batch of emergency vehicle sensor data for the research scientists and first responders to analyze. We have had more of a drive and direction this week, which has proven quite productive and fruitful for us. A sample of our work this week is shown below.
So far we have:
- Combined multiple CSV files of the vehicles sensors using Windows commands
- Used the combined files to generate heat maps and graduated maps in QGIS (an example of a graduated map shown below)
- Started writing a Python script to filter out unnecessary data points in the CSV files
- Created an initial draft of our eventual webpage to display the heatmap—using HTML and Leaflet (in the screenshot below)
The first couple of weeks of work will hopefully produce initial visualizations of one fire station’s set of data. Next week, we will start rolling this process out to the other 15+ fire stations along the Peachtree Industrial Boulevard corridor and finish this portion of the project out soon. Afterwards, we will hopefully start collaborating with other researchers on this project and connect the fire truck data with the traffic light/sensor data in order to eventually optimize routes for emergency vehicles in the future.