Commercial Operations

Traffic incidents play a significant role in the congestion on highways, causing millions of dollars
of traffic delays, damaged property, injuries and fatalities. Incident management officials are
facing challenges to reduce clearance time and minimize traffic delays, especially for serious
incidents. Traffic diversion aims to accelerate incident clearance and traffic recovery with the aid
of information dissemination technologies, policy and collaborations between stakeholder
agencies. This work assesses the effectiveness of traffic diversion at two large major
metropolitan sites in South Carolina using a microscopic traffic simulation program PARAMICS
to model serious incident scenarios and traffic diversion operations. Based on the simulation
results, this work conducted a benefit-cost analysis that suggested implementing traffic diversion strategies returned $55 for every dollar spent under prevailing conditions at the study sites.

Southern Illinois University Edwardsville

Clemson University

IEM, Inc.

Paper submitted for publication and presentation at the ITS America’s 2009 Annual Meeting and Exposition

The Georgia Intelligent Transportation Systems Strategic Deployment Plan (SDP) provides
guidelines for the appropriate deployment of intelligent transportation systems (ITS) capabilities
along all roadways (urban or rural, controlled access, or surface street) in Georgia. Unlike
previous strategic plans, this SDP does not attempt to identify a comprehensive list of ITS
projects to move forward; rather, it helps engineering professionals determine the correct types and density of coverage of ITS deployments along any roadway. The SDP was developed though a series of steering committee and stakeholder outreach meetings that defined the ITS capabilities appropriate for different types of roadways. It is envisioned that the SDP will be used by the Georgia Department of Transportation during project programming, concept development, and project design to guide these deployment decisions and ensure that ITS is deployed in a reasonable and appropriate manner.

Georgia Department of Transportation

PBS&J

Paper submitted for publication and presentation at the ITS America’s 2009 Annual Meeting and Exposition

The Institute for Simulation and Training (IST) at the University of Central Florida (UCF) has a long history of conducting research and development in support of workforce needs for a variety of business sectors including NASA, education, military, law enforcement, emergency management, and transportation. IST’s training technology and simulation group has created online tutorials, lessons, tests, driving programs for driving simulators, and evaluation measuring instruments for state and federal agencies. In addition, IST has responded to Central Florida’s business community’s desire for a method to improve and train work readiness or soft skills to employees just joining the workforce, skills that that would lead to success in any field. This paper will:
• Discuss challenges and complexities inherent in providing enterprise level workforce training for the transportation community
• Describe current and former simulation and training technology projects we have worked on that blend new technologies and new educational practices for the workforce
• Propose a research and development strategy to modernize the transportation workforce

UCF/IST

Paper submitted for publication and presentation at the ITS America’s 2009 Annual Meeting and Exposition

This paper summarized the software design within the GLITS (Great Lakes ITS) I-75 Freeway and Arterial Integration project. The GLITS I-75 Project was a pilot project of the Integrated Corridor Management (ICM) aimed at coordinating freeway and arterial operations to quickly release freeway bottlenecks by optimizing the parallel arterial road’s capability to accommodate traffic diversion from the freeway. This software framework links two different types of traffic management systems (freeway and arterial) and smoothly integrates corresponding functions together, minimizing the changes of their existing architectures. The paper will include the following aspects: 1) Functions requested to coordinate the freeway and arterial operations within GLITS I-75 Project; 2) Existing software architecture analysis for both freeway management and arterial management; 3) Concept of the collaborative software framework; and 4) GLITS I-75 Project software design summary.

Iteris Inc.

Paper submitted for publication and presentation at the ITS America’s 2009 Annual Meeting and Exposition

The objective of this project was to implement and evaluate a low-cost system that can
accurately estimate arterial travel times (suitable for use in traveler information systems) with
only minor revisions to Mn/DOT’s standard detection layout. A secondary objective is to
provide automatic mainline turning movement counts at a level accurate enough for traffic
analysis and signal timing work. This project will use a University of Minnesota developed
technology (SMART-SIGNAL) that logs, at a high resolution, real-time intersection data,
including signal controller events and detector data, whereby arterial performance measures such as travel time, queue length and progression quality can be estimated. The system will be
evaluated by comparing manual traffic count and travel time data to the values estimated by the SMART SIGNAL system.

Minnesota Department of Transportation - Metro District

University of Minnesota

Alliant Engineering, Inc.

Paper submitted for publication and presentation at the ITS America’s 2009 Annual Meeting and Exposition