Current Projects

4D Virtual Globe

The advancement of automated data reporting technologies has supplied us with virtually boundless real-time geospatial information. It is becoming more common now for public and private sectors to provide access…Read More

Arc Chart

When dealing with data sets containing hundreds of variables, it is often extremely difficult, if not impossible, to quickly discover important and significant relationships that exist among the various data… Read more

Automated Small Vehicle Transportation (ASVT)

The Kansas State University in cooperation with PRT Consulting, the University of Maryland’s Center for Advanced Transportation Technology, and Kansas University has embarked on a third phase of ASVT research to investigate the potential of ASVT to solve transportation and mobility issues in a specific environment… More

Bluetooth Traffic Monitoring Technology

Beginning in late 2007 the University of Maryland, with support from the Maryland State Highway Administration, developed an anonymous probe technique to monitor the travel time on highways and arterials based on signals available from the point-to-point networking protocol commonly referred to as Bluetooth.  The majority of consumer electronic devices produced today come equipped with Bluetooth wireless capability to communicate with other devices in close proximity… More

CHART Reporting

The CHART Reporting application allows managers and operations staff at the Maryland Department of Transportation’s Coordinated Highway Action Response Team (CHART) to quickly answer questions about their real-time and archived… Read more

CHART Support

CATT staff provides on-going support to the Maryland State Highway Administration’s CHART traffic management system. A broad range of services are provided including collaboration on system acquisition strategies, oversight of CHART system development, and supervision of the system enhancement and maintenance. Members of the Civil Engineering Department faculty also provide support and are responsible for the periodic evaluation of the effectiveness of emergency service patrol operations on the State highway system… More

CITE Blended-Learning Courses

In spite of the many benefits of web-based courses, many students miss the personal interaction with the instructor and other students. Blended learning combines web-based courses with other types of more traditional instruction… More

Clarus History Explorer

The CATT Lab has integrated all Clarus Data into their Regional Integrated Transportation Information System (RITIS) for real-time situational awareness and historical safety data analysis.  RITIS is a data… Read more

Detector Data Analysis

The Detector Explorer is a robust tool that makes the data recorded by traffic detectors easily understandable through a series of graphical reports, charts, and tables all exportable to Excel…. Read more

Evacuation Planning

Hurricanes are a potential problem for Maryland’s eastern shore, because of the need to evacuate large populations of residents and tourists using a few routes with limited capacity. Working through the CATT, Civil Engineering Department faculty have developed an advanced traffic operations tool that can be used to effectively manage the evacuation in real-time, by monitoring traffic flow, estimating changes in demand, and examining the impact of alternate strategies. Potential strategies include traffic signal retiming, diversion and information dissemination. The tool permits the user to enter alternative strategies, and evaluate their impact using an integrated set of applications including simulation, displays of traffic conditions, and other forms of visualization that permit rapid comprehensive of system status.

Explore and Visualize Crashes

Analyzing safety data to determine the cause of accidents and identify high-accident locations helps to improve road safety and reduce accident severity. Accident records contain a vast amount of information… Read more

I-95 Corridor Coalition

The I-95 Corridor Coalition is an alliance of transportation agencies, toll authorities, and related organizations, including law enforcement, from the State of Maine to the State of Florida, with affiliate members in Canada. The Coalition provides a forum for key decision and policy makers to address transportation management and operations issues of common interest. This volunteer, consensus-driven organization enables its myriad state, local and regional member agencies to work together to improve transportation system performance far more than they could working individually. The Coalition has successfully served as a model for multi-state/jurisdictional interagency cooperation and coordination for over a decade. For more information on the 1-95 Corridor Coalition, visit their website(link is external).

I-95 Corridor Coalition Vehicle Probe Project

Vehicle probe technology is emerging as a means of monitoring traffic without the need for deploying and maintaining equipment in the right-of-way. In contrast to speed sensors, vehicle probes directly measure travel time using data from a portion of the vehicle stream. Commercial vehicle probe data services primarily include the use of cell phones and automated vehicle location (AVL) data. Early demonstrations of such systems relied heavily on a single method or technology. However, services are emerging that combine information from multiple probe sources and technologies, as well as data from existing fixed-sensor networks into a comprehensive traffic information service…More

Incident Clustering Explorer

A novel, web-based, visual analytics tool called the Incident Cluster Explorer (ICE) was developed as an application that affords sophisticated yet user-friendly analysis of transportation incident datasets.  Interactive maps, histograms… Read more

Incident Management Core Competencies

There is inherent risk of secondary accidents in an incident management. In order to minimize the risk, responders from across disciplines need to know how to efficiently make themself safe… Read more

Local Technical Assistance Program (LTAP)

The Local Technical Assistance Program (LTAP), jointly funded through the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) and the Maryland State Highway Administration (Maryland SHA), provides transportation technology transfer services to agencies concerned with highways in rural and in urbanized areas with a population under one million. The LTAP mission is to stimulate active, progressive, and cost effective transfer of bridge/highway technology and to provide technical assistance to local and urban governments. LTAP accomplishes its mission through a network of LTAP centers (one in each State, one in Puerto Rico, and six that serve Native American Tribal Governments). Each LTAP center maintains mailing lists, publishes a quarterly newsletter and serves as a clearinghouse for transportation information. Also, all LTAP Centers exchange and publish information in a web clearinghouse called LTAP Clearinghouse. For more information about LTAP visit their website.

Maryland Statewide ITS Architecture

The Maryland Statewide ITS Architecture has been completed and is available on the ITS Maryland website. The Architecture documentation available on the website represents the first published Statewide Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) Architecture for the State of Maryland. It identifies existing and planned ITS projects across the state and the Architecture “Elements” associated with those projects. It also defines the relationships among the Elements and describes the flow of information between Elements. The Center for Advanced Transportation Technology has been providing technical assistance and project management support for this initiative.

MATOC

Transportation officials in the Washington area are working on an initiative called MATOC to address a mutually agreed upon need for managing transportation incidents and emergencies from a regional perspective by reacting cooperatively and effectively to incidents whose effects cross state boundaries, such as major crashes, extended lane closures, transit station closures, hazmat spills, or severe weather. The MATOC vision encompasses a number of identified core capabilities in the areas institutional coordination, system coordination, operational coordination, and public outreach coordination. The Center for Advanced Transportation Technology has been involved in the formative stages of MATOC and has received a $1 million grant under the Department of Homeland Security’s Urban Area Security Initiative to support MATOC implementation. Visit their website(link is external).

NCHRP 20-7 Guide to Benchmarking Operations Performance Measures

Building upon the National Transportation Operations Coalition initiative from 2004-05 to “define and document a few good measures”, this project refines and advances the performance measures by piloting a number of measures through the cooperation of volunteer organizations. The results from the pilot tests are used to determine the usefulness of the measures, to further refine their definition, and to develop implementation guidelines for the measures… More

NCHRP 20-77 Transportation Operations Framework

The objective of the NCHRP 20-77 Transportation Operations Framework is to develop a training and capacity building framework for transportation operations technicians, engineers, and managers. The major outcomes of the project are to determine: what training is needed, what training is currently available, what are the gaps between what training is available and what is needed, and what is the most effective way to deliver the training that is missing? Learn More

Operations Academy

The Operations Academy is a two-week, total immersion transportation management and operations program. It was developed in response to the increasing demand for personnel with skills in these areas. The program uses a mix of classroom instruction, workshops, and analysis of existing systems to ensure the retention of the principles presented. The academy will provide opportunities to practice and internalize the principles learned which is not possible in traditional classes and short courses. Acceptance to this prestigious program is competitive, and requires the nomination of a local, State or Federal transportation agency. It also requires a commitment on the part of those attending the program to satisfy the pre-study requirements, and to spend two uninterrupted weeks participating in the Academy’s activities. The academy will provide a significant development opportunity to career professionals in transportation management and operations. For more information about the Operations Academy, visit their website

Performance Measures for Mobility

Federal, state and local government agencies are recognizing the importance of performance measures, and using these measures both to evaluate their service delivery, and to communicate more effectively to managers, political leaders and the public. The transportation community is no exception. In recognition of the importance of performance measurement for transportation operations, the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) and the National Transportation Operations Coalition (NTOC) initiated a project for the development of a standardized set of performance measures to be made available to state and local transportation agencies. The work on this project was performed jointly by the University of Maryland and the International City/County Management Association (ICMA). The result of this work was the selection and definition of eleven performance measures to be used for the evaluation of transportation mobility on the nation’s highway system. These measures are intended to serve the purposes of both internal management and external communication. They were developed for evaluation of arterial performance, freeway performance and system-wide performance of the transportation system.

Performance Measures for Statewide Congestion

The Maryland State Highway Administration has a requirement for the evaluation of system congestion on a statewide basis. The information produced by this evaluation will be used to communicate with legislators and the public regarding the return received on their highway investment. The application of statewide measures is a particularly challenging task because of the variety of roadways and traffic conditions encountered in a wide geographic area. In addition, it will be important to present the information resulting from the evaluation in a way that can be readily understood by individuals who do not have an engineering background.

Real-Time Regional Traffic and Incident Data Feeds

As part of the RITIS project, the CATT Lab will be taking all traffic data from participating agencies and making it comply with the Traffic Management Data Dictionary. The lab will then make this data available via XML, JMS, FTP, RSS, and other methods to both public and private sector users. estimation, travel time prediction, traffic mapping and visualization applications, wireless applications, research, and planning.

Real-Time RSS Traffic Feeds

This research takes live traffic and incident data from the RITIS databases and creates an RSS traffic feed that can be subscribed to and viewed by the public. RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndicate” and is often used by the news media to provide important news updates. This service will be available to those with internet computer access, mobile phones, and Internet-enabled PDAs or Blackberries.

Regional Integrated Transportation Information System (RITIS)

The Regional Integrated Transportation Information System (RITIS) is an automated data sharing, dissemination, and archiving system that includes many performance measure, dashboard, and visual analytics tools that help agencies… Read more

Regional Traffic Mapping

A significant research sub-initiative within the larger RITIS research initiative is to combine all of regional traffic incident data into one regional geo-spatial map that will be made available via the internet to both the public and to the regional public safety agencies. The highlights of this regional traffic map are its interactive characteristics along with its navigation and speed. The map is runs off of a MapServer engine and pulls GIS data directly from a PostGIS database and our RITIS incident feeds.

Sky Graph

As air traffic rises at a rapid rate, congestion in National Airspace (NAS) becomes a primary concern of Air Traffic Control (ATC).  This increase in traffic is pushing the limits… Read more

SHA CVISN Support

The Maryland Commercial Vehicle Information System and Networks (CVISN) program supports the safety and service goals of the State’s commercial vehicle operations (CVO) programs in partnership with the private sector. The University of Maryland, Center for Advanced Transportation Technology (CATT) provides CVISN Systems Architecture and Project Management support to the Maryland State Highway Administration, Motor Carrier Division in its deployment of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) compliant infrastructure to support Commercial Motor Vehicle (CMV) initiatives. A commercial, off-the-shelf Commercial Vehicle Information Exchange Window (CVIEW) has been successfully deployed for state agency use, including Heavy Vehicle Permit information. This application is being used by many modals – Maryland State Police, Maryland Transportation Authority Police, Maryland Department of Transportation, Maryland Motor Vehicle Administration, and the Comptroller’s Office). A comprehensive network of Virtual Weigh Stations (VWS) has been deployed for law enforcement use at six major bypass routes in Maryland – Route 32 East in Howard County, US 301 North in Charles County, Bay Bridge West in Queen Annes County, US 213 South in Kent County, I-95 North in Baltimore County, and I-83 North dual-lane in Baltimore County. In conjunction with CATTLab, a comprehensive set of web-based, Android and iOS apps provide SHA and Maryland law enforcement agencies associated with Commercial Motor Vehicle Enforcement with the ability to manage and enforce commercial vehicle safety requirements in real-time using the VWS network. A browser-based analytics application allows for better targeting of enforcement activities by managers and decision makers. Additional reports available for highway information systems provide real-time analytics for traffic volumes, speeds, and class related data to understand traffic trends that assist in future highway and congestion planning.

Timeline

The Incident Timeline Tool provides for the visualization of detailed real-time and historic traffic management center incident data.  Large incident data sets can be viewed in a graphical, one-screen overview. … Read more

Time Spiral

Temporal data sets often present an interesting characteristic of being linear in nature, but contain cyclic patterns that are not effectively conveyed by conventional linear visualizations and are often more… Read more

TMC Operator/Public Safety Dispatcher Forums

The purpose of these Forums are to allow public safety dispatchers and traffic management center (TMC) operators to share lessons learned, best practices, and to identify issues of mutual concern relating to their roles in the incident response process. The goal is enter into a dialogue that enhances existing coordination, cooperation, and communication amongst participating agencies. The Forums are targeted towards dispatchers/operators and/or their first-level supervisors. The Center for Advanced Transportation Technology has been providing project management support for this initiative.

Traffic Signal Timing for Urban Evacuation

Working for the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) CATT and Civil Engineering faculty conducted a research study intended to identify the most effective signal timing procedures to be used during a major “no-notice” evacuation. Using a corridor in Washington, DC, a number of evacuation scenarios were studied under conditions that ranged from a full-scale evacuation of the City, to more limited cases. The study examined evacuation times for various signal timing strategies including flash and the use of very long cycle lengths. Its conclusions are of value to system operators throughout the United States.

TreeVersity

Comparing Trees is difficult. To address this, we present TreeVersity a new interactive visualization that gives users powerful tools to detect both node value changes and topological differences. TreeVersity uses… Read more

Vehicle Probe Project Suite

The Vehicle Probe Project Suite allows agencies to support operations, planning, analysis, research, and performance measures generation using probe data mixed with other agency transportation data. The suite consists of… Read more

Vehicle Tracking Software Development

Though there are several video traffic detection devices that can be purchased from vendors, these devices are expensive, sometimes difficult to configure, they often do not work with pan, tilt, and zoom cameras, and will not work with compressed video feeds. Full motion video is expensive and often not available at the TMC. The CATT Lab is developing a low-cost alternative to these systems that can be used by TMC and research facilities to acquire basic traffic measures such as volume, speed, and incident detection, from compressed video feeds. This software will be run from a PC with a video capture card.

Virtual Incident Management Training

Training of traffic control personnel, emergency management personnel, and first-responders is a critical element in effectively managing the consequences of road construction, traffic incidents, natural disasters, acts of terrorism, and… Read more

Virtual Weigh Station

The CATT Lab has designed a series of applications for the State Highway Administration, Motor Carrier Division, to help them monitor their virtual weigh station (VWS) sites. Android and iOS… Read more