Iowa Local Technical Assistance Program

Description

Today, we are witnessing a slow degradation in the level of service highway network. On one hand, current traffic demand increases annually at the rate of 1 to 2 percent, while with a shrinking highway trust fund, the level of investments in the transportation network either remains constant or declines every year. This has resulted in a deteriorating quality of travel. As an example, the number of hours spent in congestion by commuters increases at the rate of 1 to 2 percent every year. In the transportation sector, the last decade was focused on making significant capital investments for enhancing the abilities to actively monitor and control the traffic networks remotely. Agencies installed several traffic cameras and sensors along with communication networks to provide operators real-time access to their systems.

This has set the stage for the next era of technology for disrupting the core of transportation management. We use a triad of disruptive technologies, built upon the enhanced ITS framework, to challenge the current status-quo and improve both the safety and efficiency of the transportation system without capital expense. The three main technology breakthroughs used in our lab for next-generation solution are, namely, i) inclusion of heterogeneous data sources for getting the holistic picture, ii) domain augmented artificial intelligence (AI) to assist in decision making, and, iii) big data analytics on the cloud to reduce IT infrastructure investments. This talk will present these technologies in more detail and describe how field of transportation will evolve in the coming years.