Institute for Transportation

About the research

Recent advances in data collection technologies have made it increasingly possible to monitor traffic conditions with increasing levels of detail, facilitating the task of providing advance warning of work zone conditions to the traveling public. Today, a variety of such technologies exist, including automated vehicle identification (e.g., Bluetooth), automatic vehicle location (AVL) (e.g., average segment speeds), and trajectory data from connected vehicles. Different data sources provide different types of information, have different latency, varying spatial and temporal resolutions, and different requirements for use. There is a need to gather and synthesize available information about the effectiveness and limitations of alternative data sources for the application of real-time work zone monitoring and communicating information to the public. The possibility of integrating multiple data sources for monitoring and public information uses also needs to be investigated.