Paper Reference Number: MME08 PN 32

Design and Implementation of a Moving Object

Database for Truck Information Systems
Yasser Ebrahimian Qajary
GIS specialist
Email: y_ebrahimian@yahoo.com

Ali Asghar Alesheikh

Associated Professor
Email: alesheikh@kntu.ac.ir

Department of GIS, Faculty of Geomatics Eng., K.N. Toosi University of Technology

ValiAsr St., Vanak Sq., Tehran, Iran, Post Box: 15875-15433
Fax: +98 21 878 6213 Tel: +98 21 877 9473-5

Abstract. The composition of spatial and temporal properties of real world objects in
a unified data framework results into Moving Object Database (MOD). The aim of this
paper is to describe DMOTIS (Database system for tracking Moving Objects in Truck
Information Systems), a robust framework capable of aiding a Spatio-Temporal database
developer in querying and visualizing a database with dynamic objects, that change their
location either discretely or continuously in time. DMOTIS is capable of management
and visualizing the motion of Lorries of big truck-transportation companies that transfer
commercial goods. The objects of this paper are describe the analysis, pre-processing,
modeling and storage techniques for trajectory data that constitute a Moving Object
Database (MOD). DMOTIS is capable of answering some Spatio-Temporal queries
about motion of moving objects.
Keywords: Moving Object, Moving Object Data Model, Moving Object Database, Truck
Information System (TIS), Conceptual Modelling, Trajectory.

1 Introduction

Spatial database research has focused on supporting the modeling and querying of
geometries stored in a database. On the other hand, temporal databases have focused on

1
extending the knowledge kept about the current state of the real world to include the
past, in the two senses of “the past of the real world” (valid time) and “the past states of
the database” (transaction time). About a decade efforts attempt to achieve an
appropriate kind of interaction between both sub-areas of database research. Spatio-
temporal databases are the outcome of the aggregation of time and space into a single
framework [1], [8], [11], [13]. The aim of this paper is to describe DMOTIS a robust
framework capable of aiding a spatio-temporal database developer in modeling,
constructing and querying a database with objects that change location, either discretely
or continuously in time. The reason of design and implementation of DMOTIS is that,
number of big truck-transportation companies needs a flexible way to manage the
motion of their Lorries that transfer commercial goods. The benefits to be gained from a
possible optimization of truck movements are straightforward. First of all, it is crucial
for the company’s people not only to know where the exact location of all trucks at any
time is, but also to plan future routes in order to improve the effectiveness of their
transportation network for the benefit of their clients. In this work, we deal with the
analysis, pre-processing, modeling and storage techniques of truck location data in a
Moving Object Database (MOD) of a truck information system. This work is part of a
larger research project, focusing on the development of methods and techniques for
building a truck information system based on real-world data from the roads of Iran.

2 Moving Object Database

A wide and increasing range of database applications such as tracking and transportation
systems and air traffic controlling systems has to deal with spatio-temporal objects.
Moving Objects Database is a specific type of spatio-temporal database. In Moving
Object Database (MOD) applications, Querying and information or knowledge retrieval
tools are needed. Indexing mechanisms and efficient query evaluation techniques are
required so that useful information can be made available to a user in a timely fashion.
Moving object databases are becoming more popular due to the increasing number of
application domains that deal with moving entities and need to pose queries. In the
military, MOD applications arise in the context of the digital battlefield, and in the
civilian industry they arise in transportation systems.

2.1 Moving Objects properties and relationships

Moving object database is core of Truck Information Systems (TIS), but in order to
organize a Truck Information Systems, it is essential to understand and study the moving
objects, their properties and relations, as well as the fundamental concept of movement
of objects, which is basic in all application domains dealing with moving objects,
whether they are moving vehicle or the user carrying a mobile phone. Representing such
moving objects as point objects their movement can be illustrated as shown in Figure 1.
The solid line in Figure 1 represents the movement of a point object. In geometrical
terms, the movement of an object is termed a trajectory; in other words, trajectory is the
trace of the vehicle in time.

2
 Figure 1: a trajectory of Moving Object

The trajectory representation is adequate to derive certain properties and relationships

of the object movement. Trajectories are characterized by a set of different properties
depending on the application requirements. The most common properties are [2]:
• the speed of moving object
• the velocity of moving object
• the direction of movement
• the traveled distance
Through their movement, trajectories relate to their environment in different ways over
time. In this paper, we discuss only Relations between a trajectory and its spatial
environment. Trajectories can have relations with other spatial objects (e.g. City
boundary, Road, query regions, and etc). These basic relationships are [2]:
• Within: when the trajectory is in the area of interest
• Enter: when the trajectory enters the area of interest.
• Leave: when the trajectory leaves the area of interest

2.2 Managing Trajectory Data in MOD

After having modeled MOD it is essential to represent and manage trajectory data. The
core components of a MOD are trajectories, the spatial and the non-spatial data.
Trajectory data is obtained by sampling the movement, i.e., by taking positional
measurements of the movement at discrete points in time. In Truck Information
Systems, typically GPS is used for this purpose. A positional measurement with GPS is
not precise but has an error associated. Because of this error, mapping the position of a
vehicle onto a road network is not a trivial task, especially if one has to map a trajectory
that consists of not only imprecise but also sparse positional measurements. The
technique to map positional measurements onto a map, specifically a road network, is
commonly referred to as map matching. For this work, we developed an algorithm
tailored to the tracking data that was available to us. Having the data one needs to store
it. In figure 2 roads network of Iran represented.

Figure2: Roads network of Iran

3
 In our model, we use a discrete method to describe the location information of moving
objects. The whole trajectory of a moving object is represented by a set of line segments
in the spatial-temporal space. Within each line segment, the movement of a moving
object has the following properties:
i) Spatially, the moving object moves along a straight line;
ii) The speed of the moving object keeps constant.
Coordinates of start and end point of each segment with temporal component of each of
them, is stored in database. The map matching algorithm allows us to map the
trajectories onto a road network. Essentially, the road network captures the spatial aspect
of the trajectories. The conceptual data model shown in Figure 3 illustrates the approach
of capturing and, later on, storing trajectory data by means of an underlying movement
network.
ID name ID name

Contions
Province City
1 N

ID
1 1
Node
From To

1 1
N N
From To
Road
1
Consist of
N ID
N
N
ID
Road_segmen
N
Length
ID
1 T1
Relate to X1
Y1
Meet N
Traj_Segment
T2

1 N X2
Gas Station Consist of Y2

1
ID name Spatial entity
N Trajectory
Non-Spatial entity
OF

ID Spatial Relationship

Company
ID Non- Spatial Relationship
M
Attribute
Bus

Figure 3: A Data Model for trajectory data in MOD

In this ER diagram, main entities are road, road_segment, trajectory, traj_segment,

truck and node. In this model each Road consists of several road_segment. In real,
road_segment entity is spatial aspect of roads between two cities in real world that
formed with together Road entity. Node entity is intersection between two road_segment
that have two relations “to” and “from” with cardinality 1 to N with these two
road_segments. So we can say entities node and road_segment formed road network.
The trajectories are related to the road_Segment. A trajectory consists of segments
(Traj_Segment), which in turn form a 1 to N relationship with the road network Segment

4
(Road_Segment). Road Network Segment in conjunction with nodes defines the spatial
extent of the road network and thus the spatial aspect of the trajectories. The temporal
aspect of the trajectory is captured by assigning an exit time and a drive time to the
segment entity. In result, each traj_segment stored by storage coordinates of start point
and end point and time component of it.
The other important relation that exists in this model is relation “consist” with
cardinality 1 to N, between trajectory and truck. The reason that cardinality is 1 to N is
cutting of GPS signals that caused information about truck location is not available
during lack of signal. So after truck receive signal again, have not pervious trajectory
and trajectory of it has been changed.

3 The Architecture of DMOTIS

After having designed a MOD and captured trajectory data in it, we present the
architecture of DMOTIS. MOD is its backbone and it contains trajectory data, other
spatial data, such as road maps cities boundaries, and non-spatial data, such as thematic
attributes. Figure 4 represent architecture of DMOTIS.

ArcGIS9.1 (GUI)
(ArcObject & VBA)

ArcSDE™ for SQLServer

MOD (SQLServer)

Trajectory Data
Spatial Data (e.g.maps)
Non Spatial Data
(e g attribute)

Figure 4: The architecture of DMOTIS

DMOTIS has three main components that are:

• SQLServer™
• ArcSDE™
• ArcGIS™
First main component of DMOTIS is DBMS that in this system SQLServer™ has been
used. As mentioned before data’s that stored in database consists of trajectory data,
spatial data and non-spatial data. ArcSDE™ is second main component of DMOTIS that
provide connecting to database from a GIS environment (e.g. ArcGIS™) without working
in DBMS environment. Additionally ArcSDE™ adds spatial functionality to used DBMS
with spatial data types that support them.
Graphical User Interface (GUI) is third main component of DMOTIS. ArcGIS™ has
been used as GUI of system for frequent capabilities in visualizing data and working with
geographic layers. Other necessary functionality such as kinds of query tools from
database, provided for system by developing ArcGIS™ with ArcObject™.

5
4 Operations

The design of operations that introduced in this paper adheres to four principles [12]:
• Design operations as generic as possible
• Achieve consistency between operations
• Support database maintenance and consistency
• Capture the interesting phenomena
In DMOTIS each operation was programmed with ArcObject™ and visual basic. In
real, each operation considered as a function (in programming language term) with
definite input and output arguments. So, querying from database make by call these
functions and set their input arguments. We can categorize operations to five categories as
follow:
• Location-temporal operations
o Position (T, Moid): Get (x, y) Position of specific truck at a point of time.
o Speed (T, Moid): Get speed of specific truck at a point of time.
• Orientation-temporal operations
o Direction (T, Moid): Get azimuth of specific truck at a point of time.
o Turn (T, Moid): Get rate of change of the angle between the x axis and the
motion vector at a specific time point.
• Metric-temporal operations
o Travelled distance (T1, T2, Moid): Get travelled distance of specific truck
between time intervals (t1, t2).
o DistanceMM (T, Moid1, Moid2): Get distance between two trucks at a point
of time.
o DistanceMS (T, Moid, Soid): Get distance between a specific truck and
specific static object such as gas station.
o NearestMo (T, Moid1, Moid2): Get nearest truck to a specific truck.
o NearestSo (T, Moid, Soid): Get nearest static object such as gas station to a
specific truck.
• Topological-temporal operations
o Enter (T,Moid,Cityid) Boolean
o Enter (T,Moid) Cityid
o Enter (T,Cityid) Moids
o Enter (Moid,Cityid) time
o Leave (T,Moid,Cityid) Boolean
o Leave (T,Moid) Cityid
o Leave (T,Cityid) Moids
o Leave (Moid,Cityid) time
o Within (T,Moid,Cityid) Boolean
o Within (T,Moid) Cityid
o Within (T,Cityid) Moids
o Within (Moid,cityid) length of period
Operations of this category, defined based on relation between trajectory and spatial
environment. Each of these operations has four different cases, based on their arguments.
For example, first case of operation “Enter”, specify that “is there a lorry with specific id
that entered to a specific city at time t or not?” Output argument of first case of this

6
operation is Boolean value.
• Checking operations
o Check_NewSeg (Moid, Currentx, Currenty, T) Boolean
o Check_NewTraj (Moid, Currentx, Currenty, T) Boolean
First operation of this category is “Check_Newseg” that check, does azimuth of specific
truck change or not? Second operation is “Check_Newtraj” that check, does signal of
GPS cut off or not? These operations have four input arguments that are truck identifier,
GPS observations and time of observation. Operation “Check_Newseg” by having
coordinates of truck in two sequential times able to calculate azimuth of it, so by
comparing two sequential azimuth of it, specify new row must add to traj_segment table.
Operation “Check_Newtraj” by checking two sequential times of receiving coordinates
from GPS receivers ,if there are any gap between two these times, specify new row must
be added to trajectory table. It’s evident that returned values of these two operations are
Boolean.

5 Queries

A query in a spatio-temporal database is a predicate over the database history. Queries

can be classified as spatial, temporal or spatio-temporal queries based on the type of
relationships between objects. Spatio-temporal queries involve spatial and temporal
predicates, using spatio-temporal operators [4]. Three types of spatio-temporal queries
can be considered based on the history on which the query is evaluated and on the
evaluation time; instantaneous, continuous and persistent. Continuous and persistent
queries can be used to define temporal triggers [14]. Based on the temporal state of
database, queries can be divided into past, at present and future queries. In MOD, most
queries based on the Spatio-temporal geometry, fall into the three categories as point
queries, range queries and k-nearest neighbor (KNN) queries. Point queries search for the
location of a certain moving object at a given time instant, e.g. “find the location of MOq
at tq”. Range queries search moving objects that cross a given geographic region in a
given time period, e.g. “find all objects passing the city A in the next 10 minutes”. An
example of k-nearest neighbor query is “find k moving objects which are closest to (xq,
yq) around time tq”. Different from range queries, KNN queries are evaluated by
incremental searching [10]. In DMOTIS queries classified to five categories that are:
simple queries, point queries, range queries, KNN queries and complex queries.
Additionally in every category there are three cases past, present and future.

5 Related Works

In the process of Designing database, we didn’t define any new data type, and only
used common data type supported with SQLServer™ (such as: int, date, text and etc.),
additionally new spatial data type that provided with us, when use ArcSDE™ (such as
point). Several researches efforts have tried to model spatio-temporal databases using
the concept of ADTs for moving objects. Such types for moving points and moving
regions have been introduced by Güting and colleagues in [6], together with a set of
operations on such entities. This model was the first attempt to deal with continuous
motion, while in [6] the definition of the discrete representation of the above-discussed

7
ADTs was presented. As mentioned before, in design and development of DMOTIS has
not been defining any new data type that is in comparison with other approaches.
The next step in this development was the study of algorithms for the rather large set
of operations defined in [7]. Whereas [6] just provides a brief look into this issue, in [9]
the authors present a comprehensive, systematic study of algorithms for a subset of the
operations introduced in [7]. Another model using moving objects is proposed by
Wolfson and colleagues in [14], [17] and [16]. The authors propose the so-called
Moving Objects Spatio-Temporal (MOST) data model for databases with dynamic
attributes, i.e. attributes that change continuously as a function of time, without being
explicitly updated. The authors also offer a query language (Future Temporal Logic-
FTL) based on temporal logic to formulate questions about the near future movement.
The approach is restricted to moving points and does not address more complex time-
varying geometries such as moving regions. As an extension to the abstract model in [7],
the concept of spatio-temporal predicates is introduced in [3]. The goal is to investigate
temporal changes of topological relationships induced by temporal changes of spatial
objects. Further work on modeling includes [15] where the authors focus on moving
point objects and the inclusion of concepts of differential geometry (speed, acceleration)
in a calculus based query language. In [12] the authors introduce a rich type system of
time-varying geometries that change location or shape in discrete steps and/or
continuously. An extensive set of object methods is developed that expresses all the
interesting spatio-temporal phenomena and processes. This set of operations is a
superset of the operations introduced in [7]. HERMES Type System introduces new
objects like Moving_Circle, Moving_Rectangular, Moving_Collection, Moving_Object.
TheMoving_Collection object supports not only [5].

6 Conclusions and Future Works

This work is part of a larger research project, focusing on the development of methods
and techniques for building a Truck Information System based on real-world data from
the Iranian roads network. We believe that a major contribution of the current work is
that it prescribes straightforward future research directions. First of all, due to the fact
that our study concerns only 2-Dimensional spatial objects as well as the change and
motion of such geometries in the 2D Cartesian plane, there is need to investigate the way
we could model surfaces and 3-Dimensional spatial objects and the time-changing
variants of them. Additionally, a future direction we are planning to follow is to consider
the query optimization extensibility interface of SQLServer™ 2005 in order to enhance
the performance of our system. On of the other future works that we can suggested here
is developing a system to web environment and representation data and querying on
internet environmental current web site www.iranroads.com contain Information about
Iranian roads and can used as GUI of developed system. Finally, an interesting research
exploration is to investigate generic mechanisms to map the above discussed relational
constructs to concepts coming from the object-oriented paradigm.

References
[1] T. Abraham, J.F. Roddick. Survey of Spatio-Temporal Databases. GeoInformatica,
3:61-99, 1999.

8
[2] S. Brakatsoulas, D. Pfoser, N. Tryfona. Modeling, Storing and Mining Moving
Object Databases. Proceedings of the International Database Engineering And
Application Symposium (IDEAS’04) 2004.
[3] M. Erwig and M. Schneider. Spatio-Temporal Predicates. IEEE Transactions on
Knowledge and Data Engineering, 14(4): 881-901, 2002.
[4] G. Faria,C.B Medeiros , M.A. Nascimento.An Extensible Framework for Spatio-
Temporal Database Applications, A TIMECENTER Technical Repor,April 23, 1998.
[5] S. Feuerstein and B. Pribyl. Oracle PL/SQL Programming. O’Reilly & Associates,
1997.
[6] L. Forlizzi, R. H. Güting, E. Nardelli, M. Schneider. A Data Model and Data
Structures for Moving Objects Databases. Proc. ACM SIGMOD Int’l Conf. on
Management of Data, Dallas, Texas, USA, 2000.
[7] R.H. Güting, M. H. Bohlen, M. Erwig, C. S. Jensen, N. A. Lorentzos, M. Schneider,
and M. Vazirgiannis. A Foundation for Representing and Querying Moving Objects.
ACM Transactions on Database Systems,25(1):1-42,2000.
[8] M.Koubarakis, T. Sellis et al. (eds.). Spatio-temporal Databases: The Chorochronos
Approach. Springer, 2003.
[9] J. A. C. Lema, L. Forlizzi, R. H. G・ ing, E. Nardelli, M. Schneider. Algorithms for
Moving Objects Databases. The Computer Journal 46(6): 680-712, 2003.
[10] X. Meng,Z. Ding.DSTTMOD: A Discrete Spatio-Temporal Trajectory Based
Moving Object Database System. DEXA2003, LNCS 2736(Springer Verlag),
Pages.444-453, September 2003.
[11] N. Pelekis, B. Theodoulidis, I. Kopanakis, Y. Theodoridis. Literature Review of
Spatio-Temporal Database Models. The Knowledge Engineering Review journal,
19(3),235-274, June 2005.
[12] N. Pelekis, B. Theodoulidis, Y. Theodoridis and I. Kopanakis. An Oracle Data
Cartridge for Moving Objects. UNIPI-ISL-TR-2005-01, March 2005. URL:
http://isl.cs.unipi.gr/db.
[13] D. Peuquet. Making Space for Time: Issues in Spase-Time Data Representation.
GeoInformatica, 5: 11-32, 2001.
[14] P. Sistla, O. Wolfson, S. Chamberlain, S.Dao.Modeling and Querying Moving
Objects , Proceedings of the Thirteenth International Conference on Data Engineering
(ICDE13), Birmingham, UK, April 1997.
[15] J. Su, H. Xu and O. Ibarra. Moving Objects: Logical Relationships and Queries.
Proc. 7th Int’l Symp. on Spatial and Temporal Databases (SSTD), Redondo Beach,
California, USA, 2001.
[16] O. Wolfson, A. P. Sistla, S. Chamberlain and Y. Yesha. Updating and Querying
Databases that Track Mobile Units. Distributed and Parallel Databases, 7 (3): 257-387,
1999.
[17] O. Wolfson, B. Xu, S. Chamberlain, L. Jiang. Moving Objects Databases: Issues
and Solutions. Proc. 10th Int’l Conf. on Scientific and Statistical Database Management,
Capri, Italy, 1998.