UPDATE: Friday, October 16th, 2015
The 2015 National Rural ITS Conference was held August 9-12, at the Snowbird Ski Resort in the Wasatch Mountains of Utah. In keeping with the venue’s mountainous locale, the goal of the conference was to "Elevate ITS by Traversing the Terrain to Rural ITS." Technical sessions covered a wide breadth of topics including traveler information, variable speed limits, road weather, operations, connected vehicles, asset management, and workforce development. The agenda included a tour of several innovative intersections deployed by Utah DOT and a look at UDOT’s Statewide Traffic Operations Center in Salt Lake City.
Session C1 Improvements to Traveler Information Systems & Data presented examples of increasing two-way dialog with the public within traveler information systems, integrating National Weather Service reports and data for predicting impacts, and incorporating observations from vehicle mounted data collection equipment. The session included a discussion on traveler information data quality and what several western states are doing to ensure accurate, timely, and reliable information is being presented to the public. Doug Galarus presented the results to date of the Consortium’s data quality incubator project in a presentation titled Data Quality for Aggregation and Dissemination of DOT Traveler Information: Best Practices. As a co-author on this presentation, Leann Koon was an additional roundtable panelist for the session.
Photo by Doug Galarus |
Photo by Doug Galarus |
The goal of this project is to analyze and document existing system best practices for data quality for the aggregation and dissemination of state department of transportation traveler information. Doug started the presentation with a discussion of the problem and need for the project. He illustrated the need with example data quality problems from the One-Stop-Shop website on an arbitrary day. In an effort to document best practices, the project team is interviewing personnel from western state DOTs and conducting a literature search. Doug presented the preliminary survey results to date and briefly discussed a portion of the literature review’s findings. He concluded by showing some of the quality control processes being utilized by Caltrans District 2 and the WeatherShare project.
You can review the complete presentation here or on the COATS Phase 6 Documents page. Read more about NRITS and how the WSRTC was involved, in the Consortium update from October 16th, 2015. This presentation and the others from the 2015 NRITS Conference can be found in the Proceedings at http://www.nationalruralitsconference.org/past-events/.