Watch recording of this seminar

Speaker:

Stephen Burks, Department of Economics, University of Minnesota Morris

Description:

The Truckers and Turnover Project is a statistical case study of a single firm and its employees. It matches proprietary personnel and operational data to new data collected by the researchers to create a two-year panel study of 1,000 new hires.

The project's most distinctive innovation is the data collection process, which combines traditional survey instruments with behavioral economics experiments. The survey data include information on demographics, risk and loss aversion, time preferences, planning, non-verbal IQ, and the MPQ personality profile. The data collected by behavioral economics experiments include risk and loss aversion, time preferences, backward induction capacity, patience, and the preference for cooperation in a social dilemma setting. Subjects are being followed over two years of their work lives.

Among the major design goals are to discover the extent to which the survey and experimental measures are correlated, and whether and how much predictive power, with respect to key on-the-job outcome variables (e.g., retention, productivity), is added by the behavioral measures. This is a high-turnover service industry setting, and the focus is on the use of survival analysis to model the flow of new employees into and out of employment, and on the correct estimation of the tenure-productivity curve for new hires, accounting for the selection effects of the high turnover.

Download PowerPoint Presentation (584 KB PDF)
Watch recording of this seminar

Speaker:

Chen-Fu Liao, Minnesota Traffic Observatory, University of Minnesota

Description:

The Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan transit agency has installed Global Positioning System (GPS) equipment in transit vehicles for the purpose of monitoring vehicle locations and schedules in order to provide more reliable transit services. This research project evaluates the potential use of vehicle-mounted GPS to develop a Transit Signal Priority system that improves the efficiency of transit.

Transit Signal Priority (TSP) for transit has been proposed as an efficient way to improve transit travel & operation. Bus signal priority has been implemented in several US cities to provide more reliable travel and improve customer ride quality. Current signal priority strategies implemented in various US cities mostly utilize sensors to detect buses at a fixed or at a preset distance away from the intersection; signal priority is then granted following a preprogrammed time delay after detection. This research takes advantage of the GPS systems installed on Minneapolis buses in order to develop a signal priority strategy which considers the buses’ timeliness with respect to its schedule, its number of passengers, and its location and speed.

Watch recording of this seminar
Read article

Speaker:

Omid Mohseni, Associate Director of Applied Research, St. Anthony Falls Hydraulic Laboratory, University of Minnesota Twin Cities

Description:

Underground proprietary devices have become popular stormwater best-management practices in urban areas because of their small footprints. For more than a decade they have been monitored by different agencies and consulting firms to verify their capabilities in removing suspended solids. The disparity among the results of field monitoring studies has been so drastic that it has made it difficult to assess the performance of these devices.

A simple repeatable laboratory testing method was developed in 2005 to evaluate these devices under treatment flow conditions. In 2006, the laboratory testing was expanded to assess the performance of these devices in the field. In this presentation, the results of laboratory testing of two devices and field testing of four other devices will be presented.

Watch recording of this seminar

Speaker:

Joe Labuz, Miles Kersten Professor, Department of Civil Engineering, University of Minnesota Twin Cities

Description:

Column–supported embankments are relatively novel structures employed largely at bridge approaches and highway expansions where soft soils would otherwise lead to unacceptably large differential settlements. The structure typically consists of a number of capped piles, well-compacted gravel, and one or more layers of geogrid reinforcement above the piles.

A pile–supported embankment constructed on TH 241 near St. Michael, Minnesota, was instrumented with 48 individual sensors including strain gages on the piles and on the geogrid, as well as earth pressure cells and settlement systems near the base of the embankment. Analyses of the data suggest that the redistribution of the embankment load to the piles occurs within and above the so–called load transfer platform, a 1 m layer of geogrid–reinforced gravel. Arching seemed to take place within the embankment, such that the stress at the top of the platform was concentrated above the piles.

Speaker:

Henry Liu, Department of Civil Engineering, University of Minnesota

Description:

Performance monitoring for arterial traffic control and management systems is an area of emerging focus in the United States. As indicated by the results of the 2005 Traffic Signal Operation Self-Assessment Survey, the majority of agencies involved in the operation and maintenance of traffic signal systems do not monitor or archive traffic system performance data and thus have limited means to improve their operation. This is changing as advances in computer and telecommunication technologies enable traffic management system operators to improve the tools and methods used to collect traffic signal data.

In this project, researchers from the University of Minnesota have successfully built a system for high resolution traffic signal data collection and performance measurement. The system, named SMART-SIGNAL (Systematic Monitoring of Arterial Road Traffic and Signals), is able to simultaneously collect and archive event-based traffic signal data at multiple intersections and automatically generates real-time performance measures including travel time, number of stops, queue length, and intersection delay and level of services, etc. The SMART-SIGNAL system has been deployed at 11 intersections along France Avenue in Hennepin County, Minnesota since February 2007 and will be deployed on TH55 for another six intersections in December 2007. The SMART-SIGNAL system has demonstrated superb performance at France Ave, and it is promising for large-scale deployment.