Intelligent Transportation Systems

ITS Lab @ PSU

Intelligent Transportation Systems Laboratory

A broad range of diverse technologies, known collectively as intelligent transportation systems (ITS), holds the answer to many of our society's transportation problems. ITS are comprised of existing and new technologies, including information processing, sensors, communications, control, and electronics. Combining these technologies in innovative ways and integrating them into our multimodal transportation system will save lives, time, and resources.Transportation is the backbone of our society the movement of people and goods provides the foundation of our quality of life and economic prosperity. Fulfilling the need for a transportation system that is both economically sound and environmentally efficient requires a new way of looking at and solving our transportation problems. The strategy of adding more and more highway capacity neither solves our transportation problems, nor meets the broad national vision of an efficient, integrated transportation system. We focus on the integration and improvement of all modes highway, transit, bicycle, pedestrian and freight.Traffic crashes and congestion take heavy tolls in lives, lost productivity, and wasted energy. ITS enables people and goods to move more safely and efficiently through a state-of-the-art, intermodal transportation system.

 
 

Intelligent Transportation Systems Laboratory's Featured Project:

Identification of Country Specific Characteristics of Oscillating Congested Traffic

The objective of this paper is to conduct a country specific analysis of freeway traffic oscillations. Toward this end, loop detector data from sites in the United States, Germany and the United Kingdom was analyzed. By using a method applied in previous work, traffic oscillations were identified in all three countries. Calculation of the cross-correlation coefficient reveals that they travel upstream at speeds of about 19-20 km/h at the site in the US, 16 km/h at the German site and 14 km/h on the UK freeway. Similar magnitudes were found in the literature verifying the hypothesis that they propagate faster in the US than in Germany. Furthermore, an oscillation frequency was identified by calculation of the data's autocorrelation. However, since the oscillation frequency is likely to be site specific, conclusions regarding general differences between the frequencies measured in different countries cannot yet be made. For the sites analyzed, it was found that oscillations appear every 8-12 min on the M4 (UK site), 10-30 minutes on the A9 (German site) and every 3-6 minutes on OR 217 (US site). Even though the magnitudes of the latter two countries are supported by the literature, further empirical research on several different sites should be pursued in order to draw final conclusions.

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