Online fleet monitoring with scalable event recognition and forecasting

Abstract

Moving object monitoring is becoming essential for companies and organizations that need to manage thousands or even millions of commercial vehicles or vessels, detect dangerous situations (e.g., collisions or malfunctions) and optimize their behavior. It is a task that must be executed in real-time, reporting any such situations or opportunities as soon as they appear. Given the growing sizes of fleets worldwide, a monitoring system must be highly efficient and scalable. It is becoming an increasingly common requirement that such monitoring systems should be able to automatically detect complex situations, possibly involving multiple moving objects and requiring extensive background knowledge. Building a monitoring system that is both expressive and scalable is a significant challenge. Typically, the more expressive a system is, the less flexible it becomes in terms of its parallelization potential. We present a system that strikes a balance between expressiveness and scalability. Going beyond event detection, we also present an approach towards event forecasting. We show how event patterns may be given a probabilistic description so that our system can forecast when a complex event is expected to occur. Our proposed system employs a formalism that allows analysts to define complex patterns in a user-friendly manner while maintaining unambiguous semantics and avoiding ad hoc constructs. At the same time, depending on the problem at hand, it can employ different parallelization strategies in order to address the issue of scalability. It can also employ different training strategies in order to fine-tune the probabilistic models constructed for event forecasting. Our experimental results show that our system can detect complex patterns over moving entities with minimal latency, even when the load on our system surpasses what is to be realistically expected in real-world scenarios.