Implementation and Development of Vehicle Tracking and Immobilization Technologies

Since the mid-1980s, limited use has been made of vehicle tracking using satellite communications to mitigate the security and safety risks created by the highway transportation of certain types of hazardous materials. However, vehicle-tracking technology applied to safety and security is increasingly being researched and piloted, and it has been the subject of several government reports and legislative mandates. At the same time, the motor carrier industry has been investing in and implementing vehicle tracking, for a number of reasons, particularly the increase in efficiency achieved through better management of both personnel (drivers) and assets (trucks or, as they are known, tractors; cargo loads; and trailers). While vehicle tracking and immobilization technologies can play a significant role in preventing truck-borne hazardous materials from being used as weapons against key targets, they are not a & ”silver bullet.” However, the experience of DTTS and the FMCSA and TSA pilot projects indicates that when these technologies are combined with other security measures, and when the information they provide is used in conjunction with information supplied outside of the tracking system, they can provide defensive value to any effort to protect assets from attacks using hazmat as a weapon. This report is a sister publication to MTI Report 09-03, Potential Terrorist Uses of Highway-Borne Hazardous Materials. That publication was created in response to the Department of Homeland Security´s request that the Mineta Transportation Institute´s National Transportation Security Center of Excellence provide research and insights regarding the security risks created by the highway transportation of hazardous materials

Implementing automatic geographic referencing in Utah

Efforts to use a fully integrated approach to remote sensing in Utah include a realization that data and information are also resources to be managed. A possibility that information acquired for a specific use such as geological application may be of use to others, for instance, to the highway department. Utah is trying to establish a core operation within the state to make some upfront investment in hardware, software, and technical expertise, sufficient to make the operational people in the field aware of what can be done. The key to the operation is to facilitate, coordinate, and educate, so agencies can act for themselves based on their needs, desires, capabilities, and budget

A Framework for Integrating Green Highway Performance Data with the Carbon Footprint Calculator in Malaysia

Highway concessionaires in Malaysia spend considerable assets in collecting, analysing and controlling different forms of data during highway projects’ life cycle. Considering this massive investment, nowadays the data use and information system reliability is becoming the key concern in terms of delivering value to consumers as opposed to the amount generated. The data generated is extensive and heterogeneous. This paper provides a new paradigm for integrating green highway performance data with carbon footprint data for green highway assessment. This framework is used to improve the active use of data in the generation of information and to assist comprehensively in decision-making at all levels of management. The network approach used in this study is the main component for interlinking data with knowledge and decisions, identifying the parameters of data integration for green highway assessment, determining the criteria data for integration, and assessing the overall performance of data usage. Real-time green highway data scenarios are used to demonstrate the applicability of this framework. A new monitoring performance measure called the MyGHI-Dashboard is proposed to control green highway assessment processes and evaluate the level of data usage, which will serve as a green highway performance scorecard. Through data-driven insights, this new paradigm can be used as a benchmarking model by highway authorities to make efficient and accurate decisions. This study is expected to become the central reference to mitigate the challenge associated with the use of highway performance data in real-time for Malaysian highway development

Semi-tied Units for Efficient Gating in LSTM and Highway Networks

Gating is a key technique used for integrating information from multiple sources by long short-term memory (LSTM) models and has recently also been applied to other models such as the highway network. Although gating is powerful, it is rather expensive in terms of both computation and storage as each gating unit uses a separate full weight matrix. This issue can be severe since several gates can be used together in e.g. an LSTM cell. This paper proposes a semi-tied unit (STU) approach to solve this efficiency issue, which uses one shared weight matrix to replace those in all the units in the same layer. The approach is termed "semi-tied" since extra parameters are used to separately scale each of the shared output values. These extra scaling factors are associated with the network activation functions and result in the use of parameterised sigmoid, hyperbolic tangent, and rectified linear unit functions. Speech recognition experiments using British English multi-genre broadcast data showed that using STUs can reduce the calculation and storage cost by a factor of three for highway networks and four for LSTMs, while giving similar word error rates to the original models.Comment: To appear in Proc. INTERSPEECH 2018, September 2-6, 2018, Hyderabad, Indi

NC Agricultural Tourism Directional Signage Program (NCATDSP) Study

This research project focused on studying the NCATDSP (North Carolina Agricultural Tourism Directional Signage Program) from a regulatory standpoint and benchmarking it against other similar highway signage programs in select states across the country. NCATDSP is currently co-administered by NC Department of Agriculture & Consumer Services (NCDA&CS) and NC Department of Transportation (NCDOT). A total of 21 different highway signage programs across 10 different states were studied, including NCATDSP, NC Logos and NC TODS. Additionally, many interviews were held with key stakeholders in North Carolina and the selected peer states to collect data and information needed for the analysis

A Distributed and Privacy-Aware Speed Advisory System for Optimising Conventional and Electric Vehicles Networks

One of the key ideas to make Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) work effectively is to deploy advanced communication and cooperative control technologies among the vehicles and road infrastructures. In this spirit, we propose a consensus-based distributed speed advisory system that optimally determines a recommended common speed for a given area in order that the group emissions, or group battery consumptions, are minimised. Our algorithms achieve this in a privacy-aware manner; namely, individual vehicles do not reveal in-vehicle information to other vehicles or to infrastructure. A mobility simulator is used to illustrate the efficacy of the algorithm, and hardware-in-the-loop tests involving a real vehicle are given to illustrate user acceptability and ease of the deployment.Comment: This is a journal paper based on the conference paper "Highway speed limits, optimised consensus, and intelligent speed advisory systems" presented at the 3rd International Conference on Connected Vehicles and Expo (ICCVE 2014) in November 2014. This is the revised version of the paper recently submitted to the IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems for publicatio

Instagram Dan Twitter Sebagai Strategi Humas Pt Jasa Marga (Persero) Tbk Dalam Meningkatkan Pelayanan

The Highway infrastructure that is used for daily mobility for the people of Indonesia. The purpose of the building of highways, one parse congestion. But this time the vehicle's volume growth is inevitable and lead to the emergence of the problem of congestion on the highways. When the highway claim as a freeway. Such a State is certainly is not expected by the toll road users in General. With the information from officials, will greatly assist users in monitoring the State of the highways before using it. Research on this issue is made at PT Jasa Marga, which is the largest Highway management company in Indonesia using qualitative descriptive method. Observation, key informant interviews and additional informants, as well as utilizing previous research is a technique used in drawing up the research. The result of the research shows that strategy by disseminating informatio

Evaluation of the Most Significant Factors Influencing the Production Rates of Highway Construction Activities

The utilization of realistic production rates is key for the accurate estimation of the contract time in highway projects. Several factors have an impact on production rates and change the total duration of construction projects. To organize and complete projects in a timely, quality and financially responsible manner, projects need to be scheduled carefully. Schedulers and planners of the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) have been noticing that the estimated timelines are far from the reality and want to investigate if external factors can be the cause of this discrepancy. Some of the factors considered in this study are the systems used to schedule highway projects, weather conditions, temperature, location and shifts. This paper aims to investigate how these factors affect projects’ schedules in order to help schedulers create more realistic timelines. Past highway projects developed in Texas, were used to extract the information valuable to perform statistical analysis and determine if these factors have a significant effect on the productivity rates of construction activities