TITLE:
Dashboards for Monitoring Congestion and Crashes in Interstate Work Zones
AUTHORS:
Michelle Mekker, Howell Li, Ed Cox, Darcy Bullock
KEYWORDS:
Work Zone, Congestion, Maintenance of Traffic, Construction, Queue
JOURNAL NAME:
American Journal of Operations Research,
Vol.9 No.1,
January
22,
2019
ABSTRACT: Work zones present challenges to safety and mobility that require agencies to
balance limited resources with vital traffic management activities. Extensive
literature exists regarding the impact of congestion and recommendations for
work zone design to provide safe and efficient traffic operations. However, it
is often infeasible or unsafe to inspect every work zone within an agency’s jurisdiction,
so it is important to obtain operational feedback regarding congestion
and crashes in work zones to prioritize inspection activities. This paper
outlines the use of connected vehicle speed data and crash report data to
identify operational performance problems in work zones. This is a way to
provide feedback to queuing models used to design maintenance-of-traffic
(MOT) plans. A weekly work zone report and dashboards were developed for
use by the Indiana Department of Transportation (INDOT) for the purpose
of assessing and improving both mobility and safety in work zones. The study
has developed a mile-hours of congestion graph, frequency of speed delta
heat map, congestion profile graph, and the Route Builder interactive application
to comprehensively visualize work zone performance. This weekly report
provides a mechanism for agency staff to maintain situational awareness
of which work zones were most challenging for queues and during what periods
those were likely to occur. In one case study, the reports were used to
identify and mitigate operational performance problems in a work zone
within 4 weeks, reducing congestion and crash rates. The integration of these
data provided project managers with quantitative information about traffic
mobility and performance of work zones for informed decision-making during
the construction season.