Sustainability

It is a fact: systems that are implemented but not properly maintained have more odds to fail. The same applies for deployments of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). ITS being such a “new" area within the transportation field requires a different approach for maintenance. ITS involves technologies that are not only constantly changing but also subject to extreme environmental conditions making maintenance unique and challenging. ITS maintenance is consuming more time and resources than originally expected, and budgeted, by many transportation agencies; mainly due to little or no previous experience to use as a baseline. Even through ITS started to be deployed more than 20 years ago under various acronyms (i.e., IVHS), maintenance has generally been kept “in-house” and few lessons learned experiences have been documented. Maintenance is not glamorous! The purpose of this paper is to share with the ITS community an experience obtained from over 3 years of maintenance of an ITS deployment including both legacy systems and system expansions.

TransCore

Presented at the ITS America Annual Conference and Exposition, April 26 - 28, 2004 San Antonio, Texas

Maricopa County is one of the fastest growing regions in the United States (US).  The
region’s cities, once separated by large distances, are now immediate neighbors.  The
transportation, public safety, and emergency management agencies at these cities rely more
and more on information about neighboring systems for traffic management. The region has a
statewide Arizona Department of Transportation Traffic Operations Center (ADOT TOC),
Maricopa County Department of Transportation (MCDOT) Traffic Management Center
(TMC) and eight local traffic management centers, with additional municipal TMCs coming
on line in the region over the next several years. The MCDOT TMC was built in 1998, and
was the first TMC in the region with focus on arterial traffic management; it is integrated
with the ADOT TOC and with several of the local TMC’s to support enhanced regional
traffic operations and incident management. Traffic Management Centers house a substantial
amount of systems and equipment, and much like data centers, they draw significant power
due to the operating requirements of the various systems. According to Information Week,
data centers used “1.5% of all power consumed in the United States” in 2006 (1).

Maricopa County Department of Transportation

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

This paper examines how the CO2 cost of implementing and operating some ITS schemes could be almost halved  through  the  use  of  renewable  energy.  A  case  study  analysis  of  an  ITS  scheme  which  includes 40Km  of  Variable  Mandatory  Speed  Limits  (VMSL)  and  road  lighting  shows  that  wind  turbine generation is a feasible power supply option, with an estimated payback period of 19 years. Given that the expected life of a wind turbine is 25 years, this arrangement is demonstrated to be an economically viable solution. Climate change poses a major challenge to society and opportunities such as this to reduce CO2 emissions should be implemented to help address this global issue.

Mouchel

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

The data transmission performance of  the Inter-vehicle Communications (IVC)
system is evaluated under the non line-of-sight (NLOS)  environment considering to
the requirement of Advanced Safety Vehicle (ASV) project in Japan. In this paper, the
effectiveness of the usage of the hopping function of the IVC system for the safety
driving support applications is shown by the computer simulations and the actual field
experiments results.
 
Keywords: Inter-vehicle communication,  Road-to-vehicle communication, RC-005,
Safety driving support system

SSC (System Solution Company), Oki Electric Industry Co., Ltd.

Honda R&D Co., Ltd.

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

The Capital Beltway HOT Lanes will be a 14 mile subset of the Washington, D.C. region‟s Capital Beltway (Interstate 495) upon completion in December 2012. Buses, carpools (HOV-3+), motorcycles and emergency vehicles will be able to access the Capital Beltway HOT lanes for free while drivers with fewer than three occupants must pay a toll to use the HOT lanes. Upon opening, they will be among the most advanced variably priced toll lanes in the world. A dynamic toll algorithm (DTA) will be responsible for making adjustments to the toll prices at regular intervals based on measured traffic density. An effective means to examine, develop and test the toll system capabilities prior to implementation was considered essential.

Transurban, USA

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