Cross-cutting Issues

Parsons Transportation Group has a long history of designing Intelligent Transportation Systems for use in the transportation industry. Our work with Highway Departments and Transportation Authorities has included a great deal of work below ground in highway and train tunnels. One of the greatest technical challenges has been providing the means to bring operational radio communications below ground and into these tunnels.

Trunked radio provides a much easier and more efficient way of communicating than the conventional, dedicated radio channels of the older systems. This has made it a very appealing system but, the trunked radio system is also expensive due to the amount of rather sophisticated equipment required to execute the trunking operation and the number of base stations employed at each site.

A system of combiners and multicouplers are necessary to combine all of these frequencies onto a leaky coax antenna. Leaky coax is often chosen even though it presents high signal loss because it is the only type of antenna that can handle a wide range of frequencies and provide a signal over a large area. The leaky coax is also very expensive which has often contributed to high overall system cost.

For the sake of completeness, we are presenting three possible alternatives to radio system design for use in tunnels. The three alternatives are considered in the interest of performing a thorough and impartial evaluation. They are not intended to be all inclusive but rather, a sample of some of the available alternatives. The solution chosen should be suited to the tunnel and the frequencies available for use in that tunnel.

Parsons Systems

Presented at the 10th ITS Annual Conference and Exposition, May 1-4, 2000 Boston, MA

The GCM Corridor was one of the four priority corridors established under the ISTEA legislation. The Gateway TIS is the core system that facilitates the integration and interoperation of many other ITS systems within this corridor. The Gateway TIS collects transportation related information from geographically widely distributed TIS data source systems, validates and fuses the information collected, and disseminates it to interested public and private entities and the general public via internet and intranet.

The implementation of the Gateway TIS involves integrating a growing number of ITS related center systems of assorted natures and various technical configurations. Apart from a myriad of institutional issues that needed to be solved, a range of Center-to-Center (C2C) technical standards were needed to define communication protocols, data formats, and application programming interfaces (API). It was realized at the beginning of the project that the adoption of and compliance with national ITS standards would considerably increase the chance of success in effectively achieving C2C interconnectivity and interoperability. However, it was soon discovered that, not only the C2C API standard was absolutely absent, but also the available national ITS C2C data standards were specified as data dictionaries, message sets, which were not in a form to support object-oriented or CORBA-based software engineering practices.

Recently, the Object Management Group (OMG), an international standard development organization, formed a Transportation Domain Task Force (DTF). This OMG Transportation DTF issued a RFI in an effort to start a process of full scale specification development of CORBA-based ITS C2C standards. The Illinois Department of Transportation (IDOT) and Parsons Transportation Group (PTG) have jointly responded to this RFI by providing information on GDOM, GMOM, and our Gateway implementation experiences. We hope our pioneering efforts in CORBA-based C2C standardization in the GCM corridor could provide a proven starting ground for national CORBA-based standardization process.

Parsons Transportation Group

Illinois Department of Transportation

Presented at the ITS America Annual Conference and Exposition, June 4-7, 2001 Miami Beach, Florida

This paper presents an approach to guide transportation professionals in the evaluation of alternative fare collection systems on public transit services. The approach consists of two major elements—a broad, conceptual framework, and a detailed evaluation plan. The second major objective of this paper is to illustrate the use of the approach and selected financial performance measures based on the data reported for heavy rail systems in the U.S. whose fare collection systems include EPS and/or non-EPS applications. Results reported in the paper indicate that the evaluation approach presented could be useful to transportation professionals involved in EPS deployment and that exclusive use of electronic fare media on heavy rail systems in the U.S. has the potential to reduce the level of labor-intensive fare collection activities.

Virginia Tech Transportation Institute

Presented at the 11th ITS Annual Conference and Exposition, June 4-7, 2001 Miami Beach, Florida

The purpose of this paper is to present the evaluation results for the before and after deployment scenarios of the Orion Transit Itinerary Planner System (TIPS). TIPS is an automated transit itinerary planning service that provides detailed, personalized transit trip plans and other transit-related information for the Twin Cities metropolitan area in Minnesota. It was developed for operation by Metro Transit’s Transit Information Center (TIC) and became operational in December 1999. The service operates through a telephone interface with representatives at the TIC.

Cambridge Systematics, Inc.

Minnesota Department of Transportation

Presented at the 11th ITS Annual Conference and Exposition, June 4-7, 2001 Miami Beach, Florida

Promoting Awareness of ITS Benefits to Customers

If you build it, they will come. Well – maybe! Planning and building dynamic ITS systems is becoming a reality worldwide. Safety and congestion reduction are among the obvious benefits to drivers. But no matter how great a system you plan and build, if you don’t let drivers know it’s there and how to use it, your project can’t succeed! Great on paper, great in its design, great in its possibilities … but what’s it worth if it goes unused or is not understood?

Missouri Department of Transportation

Presented at the 11th ITS Annual Conference and Exposition, June 4-7, 2001 Miami Beach, Florida