System Management and Monitoring - Temporal Evaluation of Freeway Management Systems

Virtually every major metropolitan area in the US has a traffic monitoring system to help increase traffic throughput, decrease the number of accidents, decrease the time required to clear incidents that disrupt flow, and provide travelers information. Almost all of these systems are myopic, focusing strictly on current conditions. Yet the data collected by the sensors can provide considerable information when viewed over time. In this paper we investigate and demonstrate several applications that employ traffic monitoring system data over time to show the added benefit of the given system. Data is collected from loop detectors, dedicated probe vehicle runs, and transit AVL data sources. The tools developed provide information of use both to travelers and transportation practitioners, such as travel times, speed, traffic volume, delay, average daily travel (ADT), and vehicle miles traveled (VMT) as well as reliability, data validation, and management tools for the surveillance system itself. Many of these tools have been demonstrated in real time using data from the Columbus Metropolitan Freeway Management System (CMFMS), the intelligent freeway management system in the greater Columbus, Ohio area