There has recently been an increased interest in taking advantage of the latest Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) technologies to improve the efficiency, safety, resiliency, and environmental friendliness of the transportation system. The focus of this proposal is one specific ITS application or user service, namely Archived Data Management Systems (ADMS. ADMS or ITS Data Warehouses are designed to archive, fuse, organize and analyze ITS data and can therefore support a wide range of very useful applications at a minimal additional cost. Given the benefits of ITS Data Warehouses, researchers from the University at Buffalo (UB), the State University of New York (SUNY) have recently been working with the different organizations in the Buffalo-Niagara region that collect transportation-related data to develop a prototype ITS data warehouse for the region.
The proposed project has two primary objectives. First, the project proposes to further develop the prototype ITS data warehouse, currently under development by UB, in order to make it ready for use by participating agencies. Specifically, the work proposed includes: (1) further development and refinement of the programs designed to read and import the different traffic data streams; (2) the inclusion of additional data streams; and (3) the development of the graphical user interface (GUI) and the addition of new functionalities to allow the user to run a number of queries and perform different types of analyses.
The second objective of the proposed research is to utilize the data within the ITS data warehouse to support three innovative and novel applications of archived data. These are:
1. Developing models and methods for predicting the likely crash risk in real time; this work will involve correlating and fusing: (a) incident data from NITTEC logs; (b) real-time counts from NYSDOT or NYSTA; (c) real-time link-based speeds from the TRANSMIT system; and (d) weather information from the national weather service;
2. Developing predictive models for predicting border crossing delays at the Niagara Frontier Border Crossings; this work will involve fusing data regarding: (a) volumes; (b) border delays; and (c) weather;
3. Analyzing the impact of inclement weather on traffic operations, with a special emphasis on studying the impact of snow on truck operations, which will involve fusing data about: (a) counts; (b) speeds; (c) accidents; and (d) weather.
The aforementioned three applications are universal in nature, and all have far-reaching implications and broad impacts that go well beyond the Buffalo-Niagara region or the State of New York. Moreover, the work related to the development of the ITS data warehouse itself can serve as s a model deployment to other regions across New York State and the country.