Intelligent transportation system spatial data modeling

Transportation management centers (TMCs) generate and archive enormous amounts of multimodal transportation data. Archived intelligent transportation system (ITS) data applications today tend to focus on ITS data as a resource for transportation planning and research, mainly to generate aggregated system performance measures such as corridor travel times, speeds, and delays. As ITS data applications increase, interest is also growing in using archived ITS data to help optimize TMC operations. One area of considerable interest is incident management. This paper focuses on freeway ITS features and data. It describes a prototype geographically referenced framework for ITS data and summarizes spatial and temporal patterns in the distribution of incidents along instrumented freeways in San Antonio, Texas. The geodatabase uses architecture information and archived sensor and incident data from the San Antonio TNIC (TransGuide). However, it is sufficiently generic for implementation at other TMCs with relatively minor variations. The paper focuses on data model and geodatabase development, although it includes a summary of application examples.