Dynamic Wide-Area Congestion and Incident Monitoring Using Probe Data

Abstract

Traffic congestion and overall performance monitoring of roadways continues to be a major initiative of departments of transportation and planning boards nationwide. Information from traffic monitoring programs has direct relevance to both analysts and the general public. Traditional data analysis tools and methods in this area fail to connect congestion data with incident and event data and thus make the task of determining the causes of congestion difficult in many cases. As more traffic data are collected, the need for tools that can facilitate effective visualization of this data, both archived and real time, is becoming increasingly apparent. The proposed congestion and incident scanner tool is a web-based application that affords dynamic and interactive analysis of traffic congestion conditions. The tool provides an intuitive, minimalistic interface for generating congestion performance visualizations for specific date ranges and locations. These visualizations improve on existing tools by allowing users to interact with and manipulate the visualizations to better highlight specific areas of interest. The integration of incident and traffic event data with visualization allows users to easily correlate congestion abnormalities with possible causes as well as evaluate the full effects of events, such as roadwork and major incidents, on traffic conditions.