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Ralf-Peter Schaefer
VP TomTom Traffic and Travel Information Product Unit & Fellow
In January 2014 Ralf-Peter was nominated to lead the Product Unit Traffic and Travel Information where he holds global responsibility within TomTom for content and services around the journey as traffic, speedcam, parkingm,fuel prices, weather and other content/services. From January 2012 til December 2013 Ralf-Peter Schafer was leading the TomTom Traffic Product Unit. He is responsible for the global product development for traffic in the TomTom Group incl. Engineering, product and program management as well as sales and marketing support.
He joined TomTom in August 2006 and started to work in a position of the Research Director of TomTom’s Mobility Solution Department and as the Head of the TomTom R&D Centre in Berlin. In 2010 he got awarded as a Fellow the highest technical ladder within TomTom. His major scope from 2006 was the development of the TomTom traffic portfolio incl. algorithms and software for the real-time traffic information service HD Traffic and the historic speed profile product IQ Routes. With his team he also developed the dynamic location referencing technology OpenLR to allow cost efficient transmission and exchange of map location.
Ralf-Peter Schafer studied electrical engineering at the Technical University of Ilmenau and worked in several research organisations as the German Academy of Sciences, the German Centre for Computer Science, the German Aerospce Center (DLR) before he joined TomTom. Main areas of activities in the past and today include static and dynamic content generation for traffic products, probe technology development from GPS and GSM sources as well as modeling and data processing techniques for traffic systems.
Talk Title:
Probe Data Analytics and Processing for Traffic Information, Traffic Planning and Traffic Management
Talk Abstract:
The presentation outlines the techniccal insights of TomTom’s traffic data analytics portfolio processing billions of probe based speed information day-to-day. With the introduction of TomTom’s historic and real-time traffic technologies IQ Routes and HD Traffic in 2007 the portfolio has been implemented in nearly over 40 countries globally. The backbone of the technology is community data from GPS enabled navigation devices, fleet management solutions as well as GPS based smartphone applications for road users. Today, the entire Traffic Community of HD Traffic consists of more than 100 Mio. users resulting in precise travel time data forecasts for the entire road network. All the traffic content has been fully integrated into navigation software as well as applications for traffic planning and management. The increasing community of connected navigation devices using precise traffic information is also contributing for a better utilization of the road network when drivers follow dynamic route guidance. Precise traffic information used in navigation systems is a key asset to achieve better routing and up to date time of arrival information in congested around the globe. Traffic management can greatly benefit when traffic infrastructure can be replaced by a community based detection and control system. Using the pool of historic probe measurements TomTom publish the Congestion Index for 160 global cities on quarterly basis. This gives people a fair benchmark to compare congestion level during normal business and peak hours. The presentation will give various examples how the probe data base of TomTom can be used in different areas of big data analytics.
