Cross-cutting Issues

The U.S. Department of Transportation recently began an initiative to improve roadway safety by preventing distracted driving. To explore the efficacy of this goal, this research explores ways to encourage drivers to use their phone in a safe manner (i.e., refrain from using “texting” applications while driving). An engineering prototype was developed that limits phone applications that are available while the vehicle is in motion. The prototype uses a driver identification system to identify drivers based on their cell phone and intelligently limits driver access to phone applications without affecting passenger phones.

Authors: Donald K. Grimm, Shih-Ken Chen, Bakhtiar B. Litkouhi

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

Vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication is currently a focus of research and standardization in the USA, Europe and Asia. It is believed that V2V safety applications are able to reduce traffic fatalities significantly. Data security was identified as a major technical aspect to resolve before potential deployment. In particular, communication security and privacy are main aspects to consider but also physical security of the microcontroller, key injection, privacy mechanisms implemented by government agencies, and policy questions around security. This article provides an overview of the current state and of open issues.

Author: André Weimerskirch

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

Author:      John A.A. Opiola

Senior Partner/Vice President

D’Artagnan Consulting LLC

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

The SafeTrip-21 (Safe and Efficient Travel through Innovation and Partnerships for the 21st Century) initiative was established to test and evaluate integrated, intermodal ITS applications, particularly those that do not entail extensive public sector infrastructure but can achieve immediate benefits and demonstrate the potential for sustainable deployment. These efforts and resulting applications support the U.S. DOT goals to improve safety, reduce congestion, and advance the nation’s transportation system. A total of 8 applications were deployed and tested across two test beds. SAIC was selected to conduct an independent national evaluation of these technologies which concluded in May 2011 and provided lessons learned to the ITS community related to technology use, consumer response, user-perceived benefits, and technical and institutional issues. Keywords: real-time traveler information, smart phones, geofencing, in-vehicle safety warnings, transit, multi-modal trip planning, probes, connected vehicles.

Author: Christopher Armstrong

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

Automatic vehicle sensors provide link traffic flow data in a transportation network which is valuable information to address long-term traffic planning and short-term operational needs of the transportation agencies. However, these sensors and their deployment are expensive, leading to the strategic problem of the identification of the subset of links on which to install them to maximize the information on link flows using a limited number of sensors. The need to estimate flows on the maximum number of possible links based on the measurement of link flows on a subset of links that have sensors installed on them, leads to the network sensor location problem (NSLP). Mostly, the NSLP is either solved as a sub-problem of broader problems such as origin-destination (O-D) matrix estimation, or by focusing on long-term
planning considering static traffic conditions. Since, in an operational context, traffic conditions change with time and multiple paths are used as the traffic evolves, there is the need to consider the dynamic traffic conditions in the NSLP. In this study, we formulate the NSLP to capture the traffic dynamics using the dynamic link-path incidence matrix which indicates the time-dependent presence of flow on links. This problem is then solved over the horizon of interest to obtain the subset of links that provide maximum expected network-level observability through sensors installed on them. In each time interval, the dynamic link path incidence matrix is used to compute the “basis links,” that is, the subset of links that provide complete observability of the network. The set of basis links computed in each time interval is used to identify the subset of links to install sensors on by maximizing observability gain from the links while considering the maximum number of sensors available for installation. The approach is useful for deploying short- term operational/long-term planning and link-based applications in traffic networks.

Author: Sushant Sharma

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