While the other teams were taking overnight visits to their sites earlier this week, we continued working back at Georgia Tech.
In the first half of the week, we met a couple of times with Zixiu Fu, the master’s student working on the project, to get more information on the signal data. Currently we are processing the data for him to understand how the traffic light data works, and to see if we can tell when the fire truck passed through the traffic light intersection based off of the traffic light’s behavior. Memory errors and slow runtimes, due to the size of the data, required us to create more scripts to break up these files into smaller chunks to access the data stored inside.
We also received emergency logs from Dr. Guin, showing us where the fire trucks are located. We geocoded the fire truck locations based off of the given addresses to figure out where the logged emergencies occurred. With this, we hope to connect the routes that we already analyzed to emergency responses—helping us determine when a fire truck is responding to an emergency.
On Thursday, we took a day trip to one of the Gwinnett County fire stations with Dr. Guin. At the station, we hoped to better understand the firefighter’s perspectives and procedures when responding to emergencies. We asked about how they how they handle approaching an intersection, how fast they generally travel when on the road, and how timing can affect their response to an emergency call. Overall, the emergency personnel all favored this project because it would greatly benefit them in the long run.
Next week, we will collaborate with Zixiu to integrate our GPS data with the signal data. Specifically, we hope to start optimizing a query that will analyze a traffic intersection and obtain the signal status so that we can see how it matches up with the existing data that we have. We want to visualize the number of different fire trucks meeting at certain intersections, since it’s common for different stations to cross paths during emergency responses.