Since the initial “Applications of Advanced Technologies in Transportation Engineering” conference in 1989, numerous examples of advanced technology applications have appeared. The need for such applications has grown, especially with continuing economic development and new social goals such as sustainability. Fortunately, a variety of new and promising technologies are available for application.

The introduction of a new generation of wide-bodied, double-decked aircraft known as new large aircraft is expected to have a heavy impact on the design and operation of the baggage claim area. This paper discusses an analytical methodology to size the baggage claim device and its surrounding area. The methodology models the correlation between the arrival times of bags belonging to the same passenger cluster, as well as the influence of passenger clusters on the area requirement. The use of two claim devices—one for each aircraft deck—is suggested and shown to have a potential to reduce the claim area requirement.

There is a prevailing assumption that Freeway Service Patrol (FSP) programs improve safety for unassisted motorists by reducing the likelihood of secondary accidents. This research identifies 84,684 accident records from the California Highway Patrol’s First Incident Response Services Tracking system, and subjects these data records to a sequence of filters that check for incrementally more stringent conditions consistent with secondary accidents. This paper shows that secondary accidents on Los Angeles freeways are much less frequent than suggested in the transportation engineering literature. Avoiding secondary accidents provides only a small incentive to deploy FSPs, but the expected benefits associated with reducing already low secondary accident rates may still be sufficient to justify accounting for these costs.

The goal of the research was to study consistency of design on two-lane rural highways and to ascertain the existence of a relationship between consistency and safety level. The immediate objectives were to develop new, independent measures of consistency that could reflect the similarity (or lack thereof) of performance along an entire level or hilly section, to develop a new consistency model, and to find the relationship between the new model and crash rates on two-lane rural highways. Two consistency measures were developed: the first was the relative area bounded by the speed profile and the average weighted speed; the second was the standard deviation of operating speeds in each design element along the entire section investigated. Following an extensive sensitivity analysis of these two measures, thresholds that quantified the design quality were suggested. Based on the two independent measures, a consistency model was developed; and thresholds for good, acceptable, and poor design consistency of any section were proposed. Additional analysis was conducted on the relationship between the proposed consistency model and the safety level of two-lane highways. This was done initially on a limited data set of nine local, two-lane highway sections. It was found that as design consistency increased, crash rates decreased significantly. In a second phase, the analysis was expanded and the same consistency model was applied to a data set of 28 two-lane U.S. highways. It was found that crash rates decreased when the consistency value increased.

This paper presents the findings of a study evaluating the potential benefits of implementing transit signal priority along the Columbia Pike arterial corridor, in Arlington, Va. The study uses the INTEGRATION microscopic traffic simulation model to evaluate the impact of a number of alternative priority strategies on both the prioritized buses and general traffic during the morning peak and midday traffic periods. The transit priority strategies considered include providing priority to express buses traveling along Columbia Pike, to both express and regular buses along the arterial, and to all buses within the study corridor. The priority logic that is considered in the study provides simple green extensions and green recalls within a fixed-time traffic signal control environment. The simulation results indicate that the buses provided with priority would typically benefit from transit priority, but that these benefits may be obtained at the expense of the overall traffic, particularly when traffic demand is high. However, it is also found that in periods of lesser demand, the overall negative impacts could be negligible due to the availability of spare capacity at the signalized intersections.

The performance of three traffic analysis tools: CORSIM, SIMTRAFFIC, and SYNCHRO was investigated for application to diamond interchanges. Actuated signal operation was implemented for different ramp spacings and traffic patterns. The performance differences were discussed for three performance measures: Cycle length, average delay, and total stops. Our research showed that the two microscopic models (CORSIM and SIMTRAFFIC) produced similar performance, but the macroscopic program SYNCHRO provided different performance trends. It was found that SYNCHRO 4 and SIMTRAFFIC produced different phase splits for the same input data. Therefore, there is a possibility that estimated delay (or stops) performance could vary depending on the model selected. Our results also indicate that SYNCHRO 4 apparently does not reflect some progression effects properly, thus the application of SYNCHRO 4 for diamond interchanges should be used with caution. Either SIMTRAFFIC or CORSIM used in conjunction with hardware-in-the-loop simulation should be used for analysis of actuated diamond interchanges. It was also found that SIMTRAFFIC tended to model queue spillback conditions more restrictively at the upstream intersection than did CORSIM or SYNCHRO.

The accuracy of detector data is paramount for traffic surveillance, control, and information systems, yet little has been published on identifying or correcting errors in the data. This paper presents eight detector validation tests for freeway surveillance using individual vehicle data collected from loop detectors. Five of these tests can be applied to single-loop detectors, while all of them can be applied to dual-loop detectors. The tests are used to contrast the performances of different sensor models, and most of the tests are presented using 24-h blocks of data. In practice, they can also be used to identify permanent and transient hardware problems in other components of the detection system, for example, cross talk between loops or a short in the lead wires. For operational implementation, the tests could be modified to be applied hourly or after a fixed number of vehicles pass. Some of the tests can even be used to “clean up” erroneous measurements.

In past research, several versions of hybrid genetic algorithm–simulation methodology have been proposed for scheduling of multiple lane closures that aims to minimize a network’s total traffic delay. The genetic algorithm is used as a search engine for generation of lane closure schedule, while a microscopic traffic simulation model is employed to calculate the total network travel time under each lane closure scenario. A difficulty in implementing this methodology practically is the long computing time required, due to the many simulation runs needed to evaluate the average total network travel time of each feasible schedule. This paper applies the precondition technique, standard error criterion, and termination criterion to reduce the number of necessary simulation runs. As a further improvement, traffic simulations are distributed in different processors of a multiprocessor machine. To further reduce the computing time, a two-stage hybrid genetic algorithm methodology has been proposed in this paper. This two-stage methodology consists of a hybrid genetic algorithm–traffic assignment methodology as the first stage, followed by a hybrid genetic algorithm–distributed simulation methodology as the second stage. The traffic assignment model is used to replace the traffic simulation model in the estimation of total network travel time in stage 1. The applications of the improvement techniques have been demonstrated through a hypothetical problem involving 20 lane closure requests in a network consisting of 986 links, 397 nodes, and 22 origin-destination zones. Together, these improvement techniques contributed to up to 87% reduction in waiting time for a solution of the example problem.

Adaptive ramp metering has undergone significant theoretical developments in recent years. However, the applicability and potential effectiveness of such algorithms depend on a number of complex factors that are best investigated during a planning phase prior to any decision on their implementation. The use of traffic simulation models can provide a quick and cost-effective way to evaluate the performance of such algorithms prior to implementation on the target freeway network. In this paper, a capability-enhanced PARAMICS simulation model has been used in an evaluation study of three well-known adaptive ramp-metering algorithms: ALINEA, BOTTLENECK, and ZONE. ALINEA is a local feedback-control algorithm, and the other two are areawide coordinated algorithms. The evaluation has been conducted in a simulation environment over a stretch of the I-405 freeway in California, under both recurrent congestion and incident scenarios. Simulation results show that adaptive ramp-metering algorithms can reduce freeway congestion effectively compared to the fixed-time control. ALINEA shows good performance under both recurrent and nonrecurrent congestion scenarios. BOTTLENECK and ZONE can be improved by replacing their native local occupancy control algorithms with ALINEA. Compared to ALINEA, the revised BOTTLENECK and ZONE algorithms using ALINEA as the local control algorithm are found to be more efficient in reducing traffic congestion than ALINEA alone. The revised BOTTLENECK algorithm performs robustly under all scenarios. The results also indicate that ramp metering becomes less effective when traffic experiences severe congestion under incident scenarios.

Existing methods for estimating origin–destination (O–D) matrix from link traffic counts cannot consider multiple-vehicle information, which is easily obtained from a field survey. Those methods use a single-vehicle information and it may decrease the performance of an O–D matrix estimator. Up until now, there is little research regarding multiple-vehicle O–D matrix estimation from multiple-vehicle link counts. This paper suggests a multiple-vehicle O–D matrix estimation from traffic counts using a genetic algorithm (GAMUC). From the numerical tests, we found that the performance of GAMUC was better than those of the previous methods for the error of target O–D matrix and for the number of link counts. In this paper, we also found that the method provided good results on the error of target O–D matrix and on the varied O–D matrix structure, which occurred when the target O–D matrix was different from the true one.

Even though the MOBILE5 model has been widely used in air-quality analysis, it cannot be used in the evaluation of transportation improvements that result in a reduction of vehicle acceleration or deceleration. In this study, least-square regression models were developed to take into account the effect of acceleration or deceleration. To fully capture the dynamics of acceleration or deceleration, the value of acceleration or deceleration in the current period and those in previous periods were included. In addition, the durations of acceleration or deceleration were also considered. Grade was incorporated into the models by using it to adjust the values of acceleration or deceleration. In addition to these independent variables, variables that represent tractive power were also introduced into the models. The results from the calibration of the models indicated that most of the coefficients can be reasonably explained. The emissions model developed in this study was evaluated from microscopic and macroscopic perspectives. The results show that the emissions model developed in this study performs better than two other existing emissions models.

The Highway Capacity Manual (2000) states that the capacity of a two-lane rural highway under ideal conditions is 3200 passenger car unit per hour for both directions combined. The ideal conditions as given in the manual do not include the riding quality of a road, which deteriorates with time. The present study has shown that the capacity of a two-lane rural road is also affected by the road roughness. Data collected on the roughness and free-flow speed of cars and heavy vehicles at a length of 55 km on three highways in India was used to establish the relationship between these two variables. Further, speed–volume data collected at eight different sections of two-lane roads were analyzed and the effect of road roughness on capacity was evaluated.

Light rail transit (LRT) offers the widest range of opportunities to the design community in “applications engineering.” There are certainly more varied possibilities in the design and configuration of LRT than in that of rail rapid transit or commuter rail. Consequently, it is particularly important to understand the relationship between applications design and railway operations when deploying light rail. The development of a new rail system should begin with a clearly stated operational requirements document and then evolve to a comprehensive, systems-level design. This evolution must be supported by an active systems integration process. Examples of this approach are taken from the deployment of the Hudson-Bergen Light Rail, a high-performance light rail transit system located in northern New Jersey that is currently in deployment through a design, build, operate, and maintain contract.

To introduce a performance specification, pavement foundations must be designed using analytical methods incorporating the laboratory measured parameters of resilient elastic modulus and resistance to permanent deformation of the subgrade and foundation materials. This paper presents results from a program of repeated load triaxial tests performed on a range of fine-grained subgrades prepared in a number of states to evaluate these parameters for various design conditions. The results highlight several difficulties in measuring small strains on “undisturbed” soils over a large strain range and in predicting and modeling long-term behavior. However, testing at higher strains has shown that the deviator stress at which the cumulative permanent deformation starts to increase significantly, termed the “threshold stress,” approximates to 50% of the deviator stress at failure. In addition, the resilient modulus of the soils is shown to approach a low asymptotic value at higher deviator stress. Comparison between elastic and plastic behavior shows that the deviator stress at “threshold” coincides with the stiffness asymptote. Using these correlations a simplified mechanistic design method for pavement foundations is proposed.

Most low-volume roads are primarily thin flexible pavements with an unbound base and subgrades. This is especially true for the behavior of unbound pavement materials, which is very nonlinear and stress dependent, even at low traffic stresses. A need therefore exists for more realistic prediction of pavement response for such pavements, based on proper constitutive models and computational methods. For this reason, the nonlinear, stress-dependent finite-element program for pavement analysis was developed. Stress-dependent models for the resilient modulus and Poisson’s ratio of unbound pavement materials are incorporated into the finite-element model to predict the resilient behavior within the pavement layers under specified wheel loads. The results of this study show that the developed finite-element model with stress dependency is suitable for calculating a reduced horizontal tension in the bottom half of unbound aggregate base layers. Unlike conventional methods for correcting horizontal tension, compressive stresses can be obtained only by the use of proper constitutive material models and the finite-element approach. It is also noted that the effects of nonlinearity and the varying stress-dependent modulus and Poisson’s ratio, especially in the base layers, could be substantial, and the proper selection of material properties is very important to improve the prediction of those behaviors.

Field data from a section of heavily instrumented concrete pavement on the Gene Snyder Freeway (I-265), Louisville, Kentucky were closely examined. To predict the mechanical behavior of the rigid pavement, a three-dimensional (3D) finite element pavement model was developed using the ANSYS program. The 3D finite element model was successfully implemented for predicting the stresses and strains in the concrete slabs. An important conclusion of this study was that temperature-induced pavement responses were more significant than traffic-induced responses. This is a very important finding, and can potentially have serious design implications. Applications of this work may include the development of a more scientifically based rigid pavement design and analysis systems for Kentucky conditions. Results of this study will serve as background information for the implementation of new pavement design procedures in Kentucky.