Improve Traffic Volume Estimates From MnDOT's Regional Traffic Management Center

The Regional Transportation Management Center (RTMC) at the Minnesota Department of Transportation (MnDOT) deploys a large number of traffic detectors in the Twin Cities' freeway network and continuously collects traffic data. While RTMC mainly uses the data for traffic and incident management; the TFA (Traffic Forecasting and Analysis) office uses the same data for monitoring; forecasting; planning; and reporting of transportation applications. RTMC provides current and historical volume data generated from its freeway network; but it does not provide quality information on that data. The objective of this project was to develop a new tool that can quickly explore the quality of detector data. To allow exploration of data quality; 13 detector-health parameters were computed using raw volume and occupancy data and then they were stored in a relational database. The final detector-health system was implemented as a client server-based system; in that a single server served many remote clients through the Internet. This report provides descriptions of the detector-health parameters; principles applied; server implementation; client software; and some analyses and application examples.