Arterial Data Acquisition and Network-Wide Travel-Time Estimation— Phase II

Tuesday, November 11, 2008
3:00 p.m.–4:30 p.m. CST

Mechanical Engineering Building, Room 1130
111 Church Street SE, Minneapolis
University of Minnesota Twin Cities - East Bank

This workshop will present the current progress of an ongoing project about the estimation of travel time in Twin Cities arterials. In the completed Phase I of this project, a suite of link performance functions, based on the demand flow, traffic control, and geometric characteristics, was developed and evaluated to produce plausible estimates of travel times when given predicted flows. The estimates are even better when field measurements are available. In the ongoing Phase II, researchers are seeking to scale up the methodology to estimate travel times in as many arterials in the Twin Cities metro region as possible. Field measurement data, such as traffic volumes, speeds, and traffic control plans, are being acquired and a geo-database is being constructed.

The prime objective of Phase II is to not only compute default estimates of arterial travel times on all Twin Cities arterial links by applying the methods developed in Phase I, but to update these default estimates using the collected traffic data, and incorporate these into the GIS-based database. Considering the correlation among network links, the travel-time update with the link performance functions is non-trivial and the methodology is designed carefully. This presentation will focus on two parts: the development of the initial travel-time estimate and the current progress of acquiring and geo-referencing information on 3,500 signalized intersections in the Twin Cities metro.

Speaker

John Hourdos, Director, Minnesota Traffic Observatory Department of Civil Engineering

Sponsors

This event is sponsored by the University of Minnesota's Center for Transportation Studies through a grant provided by the McKnight Foundation.

Credit

Each workshop may qualify for Professional Development Hours (PDH).