Analysis of Dynamic Advisory Messaging – Phase II

Project Details
STATUS

Completed

PROJECT NUMBER

16-591

START DATE

04/15/15

END DATE

08/30/18

FOCUS AREAS

Safety

RESEARCH CENTERS InTrans, CTRE
SPONSORS

Iowa Department of Transportation

Researchers
Principal Investigator
Skylar Knickerbocker

Research Scientist, CTRE

Co-Principal Investigator
Zachary Hans

Director, CWIMS

Co-Principal Investigator
Neal Hawkins

Associate Director, InTrans

Co-Principal Investigator
Anuj Sharma

Co-Director, REACTOR

About the research

Transportation agencies spend significant portions of their annual budgets to facilitate safe and efficient travel under hazardous weather conditions. This project is a continuation of the project titled Evaluation of Dynamic Advisory Messaging – Phase I that further supports the Iowa Department of Transportation’s (DOT’s) desire to explore how a dynamic advisory system might work within the Iowa DOT Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) platform through data obtained for a segment of I-35.

The evaluation contrasted sensor-driven messages (dynamically derived), based on an algorithm developed in Phase I, with measurements of speed data under various winter weather conditions. In addition, other data inputs such as friction sensors were considered by comparing their outputs to traffic sensor data.

Overall, the dynamic advisory messaging system performed as desired by providing alerts of deteriorating conditions during severe winter events. The system can also identify other sources of traffic impacts outside of winter weather conditions, such as slow speeds that occur as a result of an incident. The signature of winter events was present in both the friction and traffic data; however, the friction data at times had more latency. This may be due to the different data reporting frequencies. The findings showed that speed sensors provided awareness of winter events as well as other non-weather related traffic slowdowns.

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