Featured Projects
Traffic Management Laboratory
A complete simulation and modeling center, equipped for any project from a single intersection to a metropolitan area.
Optimizing traffic signal algorithms; increasing or decreasing travel demand; reconfiguring road networks—the Traffic Control Laboratory combines digital micro-simulation of traffic with fully configurable signal control hardware to create a complete environment for the development and testing of new traffic control strategies.
Data acquisition and sensing
The Minnnesota Traffic Observatory has developed several generations of data acquisition systems to meet the needs of researchers working on freeway traffic flow issues. The most recent of these is the Beholder system, a fully independent network of video detectors providing space- and time-continuous coverage of the I-35W/I-94 Commons freeway area in Minneapolis—the freeway section with the highest crash frequency in the state.
Beholder expands on the pioneering Autoscope™ system, originally developed at the University of Minnesota and now in commercial use. Beholder’s portable monitoring stations are currently deployed on the roofs of several high-rise buildings overlooking the freeway, and transmit data back to the lab via a high-speed wirelessetwork. Available data include individual vehicle measurements and trajectories of vehicles involved in crashes and near-crashes.
The Minnesota Department of Transportation (Mn/DOT) supplies sixteen switchable ucompressed/analog video feeds to the lab. Researchers have the ability to switch between any of the approximately 300 Mn/DOT cameras monitoring the metropolitan freeway network for observation and data collection.
The MTO’s data capabilities are also being used to support research into traffic management on arterial streets. The SMART-SIGNAL system, developed in the MTO, integrates vehicle detection and signal phase tracking and breaks new ground in the scale and resolution of data on arterial intersections.
Simulation and modeling
The Observatory maintains several major simulation packages suitable for microscopic flow simulations based on individual vehicles and macroscopic (platoon-based) modeling, including VISSIM, AIMSUN NG, and KRONOS 9—a package developed at the ITS Institute.
Recent simulation and modeling projects at the ITS Laboratory have focused on improving the efficiency of metered access to urban freeway networks, and developing a dynamic, centrally regulated traffic signal preemption system for emergency vehicles.