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Professor Billy Williams, North Carolina State University
Seminar Title Traffic Flow Observation and Modeling: Why is Rigor Important? The Emergence of Travel Time Reliability as a Key System Performance Measure
Abstract
Third party data based primarily on floating car observations are now ubiquitous in the developed world, and the emergence of connected vehicle data is likely to continue the exponential expansion of transportation system observability. The first part of this presentation aims to support a contention that theoretical rigor is a necessary condition for ensuring that decision support and traveler information based on these exploding data resources provide a sufficiently accurate representation of the current and evolving state of the system. The second part of the presentation dives more deeply into a specific transportation system measure that has gained importance in the U.S., travel time monitoring with an emphasis on travel time reliability. The need for rigor will be brought forward, and key definitions, promises, and pitfalls of travel time reliability analysis will be explained. The presentation will conclude with a description of a specific freeway route travel time reliability tool.