Traffic Monitoring in Safety-Critical Environments

September 24, 2015

About the Presentation

While the field of traffic monitoring has advanced rapidly over the past several years due to decreasing costs for sensing, communication, and computation, a few significant gaps remain. This presentation described new approaches for monitoring traffic in safety-critical environments ranging from temporary events to city-scale disasters.

First, the seminar explored the challenges of sensing traffic conditions caused by temporary activities such as sporting events and highway work zones. Due to the unique features of these congestion triggers, real-time data streams are needed to better understand traffic. Two sensing systems are in development in Illinois. Second, the seminar linked the traffic state estimation problem with the traffic incident detection problem, resulting in a unified framework to solve both problems simultaneously.

Last, the seminar presented a solution for quantifying the resilience of the city-scale traffic network to extreme events such as natural disasters. Using GPS data from taxis, the method computes the historical pace distribution between various regions of a city and measures the pace deviations during an unusual event. An analysis indicates that Hurricane Sandy affected traffic conditions for more than five days.

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About the Speaker

Daniel Work is an assistant professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (courtesy), and the Coordinated Science Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research interests are control, estimation, and optimization of transportation systems, mobile sensing, and inverse modeling & data assimilation.