Toward Sustainable Cycling: Modelling and Visualization Issues of Cycle Paths for IoT-based Sensing

The rise of distributed sensors-based monitoring applications has allowed the gathering of important information in urban areas, strongly supporting the maturation of smart cities. In those scenarios, alternative transportation has been leveraged as viable solutions for the complex challenges of urban mobility, bringing cycling to a new setting. Actually, when assessing the quality of cycling paths, safety and quality parameters can be retrieved from distributed sensor nodes attached to bikes, allowing better perceptions of the adverse conditions faced by cyclists in modern cities. However, such IoT-based procedures require proper modelling of cycling paths, since quality parameters are expected to have spatiotemporal significance. Therefore, this paper discusses and proposes solutions for some important modelling and visualization issues related to the quality monitoring of cycle paths. Such solutions are concerned with the mathematical modelling of this problem, as well as the proposal of a generic computer-assisted solution to handle environmental parameters retrieved by sensors attached to bikes. Doing so, it is defined a uniform representation model and an expected data flow that can be exploited by any monitoring application in urban areas. As an important step in that direction, a reference implementation is described, allowing formal representation, structured processing and graphical visualization of bike-centric monitoring parameters, potentially supporting new developments in the area of smart cycling.