Towards a cloud-based framework for urban computing. The trajectory analysis case

In this paper we present a Cloud-based framework for urban computing that can be tailored to be used in different scenarios of urban planning and management that can occur in smart cities. The focus in the paper is on the management of large-scale socio-geographic data obtained through the trajectories followed by mobile devices. Our goal is to mine human activities and routines from this socio-geographic data in order to catch user's behaviour. To this aim, we introduce a methodology for trajectory pattern mining consisting in (a) finding frequent regions, more densely passed through ones, and (b) extracting trajectory patterns from those regions. Experimental evaluation shows that due to complexity and large data involved in the application scenario, the trajectory pattern mining process can take advantage from a parallel execution environment offered by a Cloud architecture. © 2013 IEEE.