User interfaces for highway traffic management

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Project description:

Operators of highway management centers provide round the clock monitoring of highway traffic, traveller information, incident management, and traffic management. Safety critical decisions are made by gathering information from a heteregenous systems providing radio communications, weather predictions, sensor and video data, etc. We are exploring how advanced user interfaces and information visualization can improve operators' situation awareness and decision making ability in routine and emergency situations.

We are providing user interface design and evaluation guidance to the State of Maryland State Highway Admistration during their redesign of CHART, the state highway management information system. One of our research focus has been the design and development of a simulation-based learning environment aimed at providing students and operators a better understanding of the effect of incidents on highway and arterial delays. We used an development environment called SimPLE developed by our colleagues at the University of Maryland.

Another exploration is the comparisons of the ways to present realtime traffic information on public websites.

Participants:

Catherine Plaisant, Assistant Research Scientist
Ben Shneiderman, Professor Computer Science
Phil Tarnoff, Senior Research Engineer, Civil Engineering
Phani Bhamidipati, Graduate Research Assistant (ISR)

Past members:
Sumeet Keswani, Graduate Research Assistant
Aditya Saraf, Graduate Research Assistant

Publications and reports:

Plaisant C., Bhamidipati P.
Vehicle Speed Information Displays for Public Websites: A Survey of User Preferences
Revised version appeared in CDRom proceedings of ITS 2001, June 2001 (http://www.itsa.org). Must be printed in color.


Plaisant, C., Tarnoff, P., Saraf, A., Rose, A.
Understanding Transportation Management Systems Performance with a Simulation-Based Learning Environment
Revised version appeared in CDRom Proceedings of ITS'99 (April 99, Washington DC) see www.itsa.org

Survey of websites providing realtime traffic information on maps (Catherine Plaisant - March 2000)

Online Motorist Information Services - Working Document on User Requirements Study in Transportation Systems (by students Sumeet Keswani and Phani Bhamidipati - Fall 99)

Prototypes:

Sponsors and Partners:

We work in close collaboration with the University of Maryland Center for Advanced Transportation Technology (CATT).

 This project is sponsored in part by the Maryland State Highway Administration and by NSF via a NSF-CIRE initiative between the Institute of Systems Research and North Carolina A&T, where Celestine Ntuen and his student Ben Okoye are conducting an evaluation of the simulation modules

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