Miovision Transforms Transportation Using AWS IoT and Smart Devices

Making Cities Smarter

Through connected sensors and intelligent analytics, Miovision empowers more than 17,000 municipalities in 50 countries to be smarter, improving transportation capacity, safety, cost-effectiveness, and performance. Deployed at intersections and along roadways, the company’s Spectrum and Scout solutions, hardware, analytics, and services turn physical infrastructure into data assets.

For example, a regional municipality in Canada was looking for ways to respond faster to accidents and maintenance incidents, improve traffic planning, and reduce operational costs. It implemented Miovision Spectrum—which connects and optimizes traffic signals in cities—along multiple traffic corridors, combining streaming video, sensor data, and analytics to achieve these improvements.

The cities in that region now receive real-time alerts when there are significant changes to traffic flow and can verify whether an incident has occurred using streaming video. Transit and emergency medical personnel are alerted to slowdowns, and technicians and responders can be deployed instantly. The traffic counts the cities rely on for planning, modeling, and signal evaluation—performed every three years prior to implementing Spectrum—can now be collected at any time to support traffic improvements.

“We help customers discover insights to optimize how traffic is flowing through roadways,” says Dave Bullock, managing director at Miovision. “Using artificial intelligence to analyze video and sensor data means cities can now understand the impact of intersection changes in as little as a few days, which fundamentally changes how they test and improve the effectiveness of their infrastructure.”

Using Miovision technology, cities can manage traffic infrastructure in real time, alert traffic engineers and emergency-response teams when problems are detected, and even automatically change traffic signals to get emergency personnel to accident scenes faster. Efficient movement can also positively affect the environment. Miovision customers have projected exhaust-pollution reductions of as much as 10 percent by getting people to their destinations in less time with less idling.

An Easier Road to the Future of Transportation

To deliver this transformational impact to customers worldwide, Miovision relies on Amazon Web Services (AWS). “Using AWS, Miovision can focus on engineering smarter solutions rather than managing IT services,” says Dave Hillis, software team lead at Miovision. The company’s entire technology stack is built on AWS. It relies on AWS IoT to connect and control its devices in the field. Hillis says, “AWS IoT provides a robust, highly secure, scalable way to connect thousands of sophisticated hardware endpoints and makes it easy to add value to that data through other Amazon services.”

Scalability is crucial. “Each of our thousands of devices can generate 10 messages per second, often more than 100,000 messages a day,” says Hillis. “AWS IoT easily handles massive amounts of real-time data and scales automatically as we add customers.”

Miovision’s data pipeline employs Amazon Kinesis (Kinesis) to process petabytes of real-time video and sensor data, which is delivered to Amazon DynamoDB (DynamoDB). The company uses Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) for compute services that support analytics, user experiences, and internal company processes. It also relies on AWS Lambda (Lambda) serverless compute to support interoperability among disparate services.

Security and control are also critical to the Miovision business model because Miovision manages sensitive infrastructure, such as traffic lights. “By using AWS IoT, we can configure individual policies for each of our devices and services, and easily manage all the certificates involved,” says Hillis. “We’ve had many third-party security audits, and any piece of our solution that touches AWS gets approved easily because of the robust security model.”

Open for Innovation

Miovision empowers cities by making traffic-management data available using Amazon API Gateway (API Gateway). “For years, the traffic-management industry was based on proprietary vendor stacks, which not only made it hard for cities to innovate, it also wasted money,” says Bullock. “We made the decision to build everything on open standards and APIs. API Gateway provides a beautiful way to deliver our entire range of services over open APIs, and it’s one of the most popular and powerful parts of our platform.”

The Miovision Open API helps cities complete projects on their own that would have previously required major capital investment. For example, in just two weeks, one ambitious student developer created three smart-city apps: one that tells users what speed to drive to minimize stops, another to help visually impaired pedestrians safely cross the street, and a third that enables police to easily scan video footage of a specific intersection after a hit-and-run.

Miovision uses AWS to accelerate its own pace of innovation, too. “Using AWS, we can quickly develop new features, kick off a processing pipeline, experiment, and then tear it down in a matter of hours,” says Hillis. “We have an ambitious roadmap of value-added analytics and global expansion, and AWS is a critical piece of that vision.”