A Spatial Issue Tracking System Boosting the Development of Track-Based Testing Environments

Abstract

In the transportation domain the relevance of test tracks and proving grounds for development and implementation of simulation and testing systems is continually increasing. Test tracks and their surroundings either represent imaginary settings or are based on real-world spatial data and often serve as a base for dedicated simulation scenarios. The manual or automated authoring of such environments is an iterative and time-consuming process undergoing frequent reviews by participants often distributed throughout a project. From our experience with fusion of heterogeneous spatial data sources into an overall 3D virtual environment as well as operating test sites we can tell that track-data-related issues arising during these reviews are difficult to grasp, to track and to communicate to the corresponding instances for solving. To simplify management and handling of such geodata-related issues the DLR-Institute of Transportation Systems (DLR-TS) is developing a map-based spatial issue tracking system. In software engineering general issue tracker and especially bug tracking systems such as JIRA, MantisBT, Redmine or Trac are well-established tools supporting the software development process. We are combining this widely used base technology with flexible map layers, which implement visual representations of project-specific spatial data. Atlassian JIRA is already used by DLR-TS as issue tracking system for various projects and has been extended to implement custom spatial properties of issues. The map display is based on OpenLayers and harvests all spatial issues related to a certain project, which are directly linked to the underlying JIRA. It also offers the possibility to create new issues by clicking in the map. Interaction between both components is realised through the REST API of the underlying issue tracking system and could in theory be adapted to various systems. Of course, the map context has to be related to the project data such as to a certain test track. As OpenLayers supports OGC's Open Web Services (OWS) we can use common open GIS technologies to serve individual map data layer. GeoServer, for example, can host map data consumable as Web Map Services (WMS). Anyway, conversion of project-specific, heterogeneous geo-databases into a standardised format understandable by GeoServer is still a manual workflow. As the majority of transportation projects probably relies on spatial data such a spatial issue tracking system can be extended to not only focus on test tracks for simulation purposes but to annotate arbitrary geodata in general. Practical application areas could be the management of road infrastructure or cadastral data. In future we want to implement interactive, map-based issue modification as well as annotation in 3D environment models. We follow a modular approach and try to rely on open and already established software components. This offers flexibility regarding the choice of the underlying issue tracker, the visual presentation layer and the map data publishing backend. The authoring of map layers is still a manual task due to necessary format conversions but may be improved to automated deployment through GeoServer's REST API in future.