Safety

The collapse of the I-35W River Bridge over the Mississippi River in Minneapolis during the
late stages of the afternoon rush was a tragic event that took the lives of thirteen people and
injured over a hundred more. There are many stories to tell related to bridge collapse including
the role of emergency responders from the City of Minneapolis and other surround communities
in the rescue effort, the ongoing investigation into the reasons for the collapse, and the rebuilding
of the new I-35W River Bridge.
This paper instead focuses on the role that ITS played in the immediate and long term response
to the bridge collapse. The bridge collapse demonstrated the benefits of a comprehensive and
large scale deployment of ITS in assisting in dispatching emergency crews as well as developing
short and long term traffic control plans along the detour route.

Minnesota Department of Transportation

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

The ITS/PS Information Sharing Project, a collaborative effort between the Department of
Transportation and the Bureau of Justice Assistance, was designed to explore and develop
information exchange between Transportation’s Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) and
Public Safety systems. The project was initiated in the fall of 2005 with the goal of sharing realtime,
accurate information between the two systems regarding traffic incidents and other
beneficial information. The domains utilize different Extensible Markup Language (XML)
standards to facilitate the exchange of data – Justice utilizes the Global Justice XML Data Model
(GJXDM) and Transportation uses the IEEE 1512.2 standard. The project resulted in creating 12
standardized exchanges utilizing both GJXDM and IEEE 1512 with data transformations in
between. Other deliverables included the “GJXDM/IEEE 1512 Compatibility Analysis Report”,
laboratory testing, a pilot implementation, and outreach activities.

Madison Wisconsin Police Department

Parsons Brinkerhoff

Houston TranStar

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

We present an adaptive communication scheme for Cooperative Active Safety
System (CASS). CASS uses information communicated from neighboring vehicles via
wireless communication in order to actively evaluate driving situations and provide warnings
or other forms of assistance to drivers. In CASS, we assume that vehicles are equipped with a
GPS receiver, a Dedicated Short Range Communications (DSRC) transceiver, and in-vehicle
sensors. The information exchanges between vehicles include position, speed, heading, and
other vehicle kinematic and dynamic information, and the information is broadcast to all
neighbors within a certain communication range. The literature surmises CASS may need a
vehicle to broadcast information as often as every 100 msec which may lead to channel
congestion resulting in message loss rates above 20%. Here we present a new communication
design scheme, supported by simulations, which indicates that CASS could be enabled by
broadcasting, on average, as little as once every 500 msec.

California PATH, UC Berkeley

GM R & D Center

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

Growing traffic density is a major cause of a growing demand of timely and complete traffic
information. In addition, the increasing deployment of navigation systems and traveler
information services further boosts such demand.
Nevertheless, most of the traffic data is still provided by static sensors like magnetic loops on
motorways and arterial roads. While considering the possibility of detecting and predicting
traffic on non-equipped roads, the cost of installing and maintaining static traffic sensors makes a
global solution based on this technology impossible.
COM2REACT (http://www.com2react-project.org/) establishes a multi-level, scalable
cooperative system involving two-way Vehicle to Vehicle (V2V) and Vehicle to Center (V2C)
communication, which will facilitate significant improvements in the flow of information
acquired by moving vehicles.

Motorola

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

This paper introduces the overview of an automatic offset generation method and its result of
applying to a trunk road in Tokyo. The Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) has adopted the
pattern selection control method to the STREAM, traffic signal control system of the MPD, to obtain
the optimum offset. Since the optimum offset is selected among the offsets prepared in advance, it is
difficult to correspond to current traffic flow and its change properly and quickly. Therefore, the
MPD has adopted an automatic offset generation method to the STREAM since 2007. This method
simulates the traffic flow in the sub-area (the minimum unit of signalized intersections whose cycles
are all same) with the real-time traffic information and obtains the optimum offset to the current
traffic flow. The method considers the traffic accident risk as well as the congestion relief. Moreover
the method can calculate the offset of all combination of the sub-areas and select the best offset
depending on their conditions to optimize the whole objective roads.

Traffic Facilities and Control Division, Traffic Bureau, Metropolitan Police Department, Japan

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