Personal Mobility

Traveler Information Services such as 511 must be easy for the customer to use and
provide useful information. The alternate route information system developed for the
Central Florida area allows motorists to request routes for their origin and destination in
very generic terms such as Downtown and Airport. They are then provided two or three
routes and travel times for those routes based upon a real-time traffic network. Since
some of the alternate routes contain toll roads, a motorist is able to choose a toll/nontolled
route based upon the travel time.

HNTB Corporation

Florida Department Of Transporation

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

This paper, using the short story format, illustrates the utility of a Reservation System to
efficiently allocate travelers to scarce transportation resources.  The story uses an analogy
with the passenger air transportation system, where a reservation system for allocating
travelers to seats in aircraft is used ubiquitously today, and shows the consequences of
switching the resource allocation mechanism from “advance reservations” to “first-come-first-
served”.  The traveler's “freedom” to go to the airport whenever he or she wishes, without first having to make a reservation, is shown to be hollow.  The implication for congested surface transportation links are left for the reader to imagine at the end of the story.

Consensus Systems Technologies (ConSysTec) & Chair, ITS America RITE Forum
and Thea D. Jaffe

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

In September of 2007 the Missouri Department of Transportation (MoDOT) introduced the
Driving Edge initiative, an umbrella of strategies that provides highway information to the
traveling public before they begin their trip, along the way and around the clock. The
program is comprised of three main elements: an Online Traveler Information Map, Around
the Clock Customer Service and permanent Dynamic Message Signs (DMS) on rural sections
of their interstate system. This technical paper briefly outlines one component of that
initiative, the statewide rural deployment of 48 Dynamic Message Signs on our most traveled
interstate corridors.

Missouri Department of Transportation

Kansas City Scout MoDOT/KDOT

Telvent Farradyne

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

Every year, thousands of vehicles are involved in crashes which are attributed to the onset of driver drowsiness. To address this issue, a prototype integrated system was developed that combined machine-vision based drowsy driver monitoring technology and the analysis of operator/vehicle performance parameters to reliably assess driver drowsiness. PERCLOS (a measure of eye closure) is considered to be the “gold standard” of drowsiness detection metrics. Systems have been developed to measure PERCLOS. However, issues including eyewear, ambient illumination, and head movement present hurdles which can be difficult to overcome. Research has investigated driver control metrics associated with drowsiness, and lane position appears to be a key indicator. This paper reports on a project aimed at integrating PERCLOS with other drowsiness metrics to form a new measure, PERCLOS+ (PERCLOS plus other measures), that may prove to be a more robust measure in a real-world, field application as compared to a single metric system.

Virginia Tech Transportation Institute

Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration

Presented at the ITS America Annual Conference and Exposition, November 16-20, 2008, New York, New York

Historically, autonomous vehicles have been predominantly used in military applications.
There are a growing number of indicators, however, that autonomous vehicles may be used
for on-road driving in the future. For a driverless vehicle to safely navigate on the same
roadways as other driverless vehicles as well as human-driven vehicles, its behavior will need
to be generated appropriately and robustly. For an on-road vehicle, these behaviors primarily
focus on navigation. Autonomous vehicle navigation for on-road driving consists of tasks
ranging from steering and speed control to negotiating complex urban environments with stop
signs, traffic lights, other vehicles, and pedestrians. Southwest Research Institute (SwRI®)
has undertaken the Southwest Safe Transport Initiative (SSTI) aimed at investigating the
development and commercialization of vehicle autonomy as well as vehicle-based telemetry
systems to improve safety and facilitate traffic flow. This paper will discuss the modularized
approach used to perform the navigation and path planning tasks for on-road driving that have
been implemented on the SSTI autonomous vehicle. It includes details on the global route
planning, local path planning, speed profile generation, and a short discussion on planning
paths for lane changing and obstacle avoidance.

Southwest Research Institute

Presented at the ITS America Annual Conference and Exposition, November 16-20, 2008, New York, New York