Cross-cutting Issues

In June 2005 a major law enforcement action occurred on Interstate 10 west of Palm Springs, CA that resulted in a total freeway closure for nearly 13 hours. The resulting lack of communications with the public and failure to notify Riverside County’s Office of Emergency Services exacerbated an already major incident and led to the establishment of a multi-agency Freeway Closure Task Force to address extended freeway closures resulting from any cause. In conjunction with this action, the Southern California Association of Governments, working together with the Coachella Valley Association of Governments and Delcan Corporation, commissioned a study to develop an Emergency Response Plan for Freeway Closures. The study area encompassed some 75 miles of freeway and adjacent arterials and frontage roads in the Coachella Valley region east of Los Angeles. Objectives of the Emergency Response Plan included developing traffic diversion strategies using freeway ramps and local arterials, a comprehensive public communications plan to keep additional vehicles from entering the area from Phoenix AZ and Los Angeles and the provision of essential services to motorists unable to evacuate and stranded on the freeway. The need for the Emergency Response Plan resulted in the development of algorithms and graphical aids to help Incident Commanders for both the incident location and the broader impacted area to make timely decisions to request resources and take aggressive action to mitigate the impact of an extended freeway closure. The result was closer cooperation between emergency management and transportation officials and an increased awareness by all agencies involved of the impact of an extended freeway closure and its effect on surrounding local communities.

Delcan Corporation

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

This paper presents Broward County, Florida’s Advanced Traffic Management System (ATMS) communication network approach at various points in the design process, documenting such events as: lab tests, field tests and device deployment. As such, it is similar to a project engineering notebook, or a detail case study. The paper is divided into sections, with each section corresponding to a distinct design phase. Each section covers approximately 3 project months, and presents the goals, discoveries, approximations, choices and other considerations, which led to the subsequent design phase. This paper will serve as a living document to record the progress of the design until its conclusion, which is scheduled for late summer/early fall 2003.

Kimley-Horn and Associates, Inc.

Presented at the ITS America Annual Conference and Exposition, May 19-22, 2003 Minneapolis, Minnesota

This paper proposes a deployment path for automated vehicles, arguing for an evolutionary process of discreet deployment where fully functioning systems are developed from the ground up in areas with the greatest opportunity and expand to become interconnected. This is an alternative to the organic deployment strategies developed during work on the Automated Highway Systems (AHS) program, whereby the technology progresses over time from manual driving to full automation. This paper compares the two approaches, arguing that organic deployment is fundamentally hampered by institutional hurdles and the difficulty of encouraging the large-scale adoption necessary to achieve the most significant benefits of automation, including increased lane capacity and vehicle speed. Discrete deployment is an especially attractive scenario for Automated Electric Transportation (AET), and different communities could develop different forms of AET, varying vehicle and service types to suit its particular needs.

Utah State University

Presented at the 18th World Congress on ITS, October 2011, Orlando, Florida

Different vehicle models generally utilize unique user interfaces. Software applications that interact with the vehicle user interface need to be adapted to for the vehicle models of interest. The AMI-C HMI Manager specification goes a long way to address this issue. This paper improves upon the original Delphi implementation of the AMIC design by adding a pluggable HMI bundle feature. This plug-in provides better separation between the HMI manager and any newly installed application extending the reusability of the HMI manager. The plug-in can be installed while the HMI Manager is running the applications that are supported by the Plug-in. This HMI architecture was tested using an OGSi framework as part of the VIIC proof of concept.

Delphi Electronics and Safety

Presented at the 15th World Congress on Intelligent Transport Systems, November 16-20, 2008, New York, New York

An Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) communications architecture is emerging with ITS-specific standards for several layers of the International Standards Organization Open Systems Interconnections (OSI) communications reference model. However, these standards neither fully leverage the advantages of a standards-based architecture, nor fully address ITS-specific security and networking requirements. This paper rectifies these shortcomings by describing a reorganization of the emerging standards and the addition of protocols for two additional OSI layers. The result is an improved communications architecture for ITS networks.

The George Washington University

Presented at the ITS America Annual Conference and Exposition, May 19-22, 2003 Minneapolis, Minnesota