What is Transportation Informatics?

In recent years, and as a result of the continued increase in travel demand across the border coupled with the need for tighter security and inspection procedures after September 11, border crossing delay has become a critical problem with tremendous economic and social costs. 

This project aims at improving incident response strategies by exploring historical incident and traffic data. Traffic incidents have become a major cause of congestion and significant threat to urban mobility. Many road networks in major cities are currently operating near, if not beyond, capacity during peak hours. Capacity reduction and road closure due to incidents can cause significant delays over an extended period. An effective incident management system not only helps to mitigate congestion through swift incident detection, response, and site clearance, but also generates significant environmental benefits by reducing fuel consumption, emissions, and potential secondary incidents.

In the present day, data for vehicle accidents in Puerto Rico for the past five years are not available.  Graduate students from the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez Campus (UPRM) who wish to develop a research project regarding vehicle accidents cannot focus on data from Puerto Rico due to the lack of this type of information; these students have to rely on either out-of-date data or records from other countries.

Performance measures and peer comparison are valuable tools that can be used as a step toward efficient and proactive management. These tools can be used to evaluate actual performance, identify areas that need improvement, and establish feasible goals for the near future.  With the most recent advances in technology it is possible to acquire a great amount of information with relative low costs or efforts. In the past, it was very difficult and costly to collect comprehensive performance data.

MAP-21 requires that greater emphasis be placed on developing performance measures to justify roadway safety improvements. This project proposes to develop an alternative highway safety performance measure through the monitoring and classification of near crash events.

This research will therefore investigate how the multiple traffic data sources can be integrated in a consistent manner, and how they may be best used for arterial performance measurement. Critical issues associated with this process such as privacy protection will also be studied.

Social media has become ubiquitous in our daily life and there has been a growing interest in mining useful information therein. Vast of user-generated content strengthens the linkage and interaction between each individual within the community circle, and also provides large amount of information related to various areas. Examples include Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google Plus and Wikipedia. The trend of easily accessing social media will continuously grow with the development and commercialization of wearable computer devices, like Google Glass and other smart watches.