An Intelligent Decision Support System for Work Zone Traffic Management and Planning

Periodic resurfacing, rehabilitation, restoration, and reconstruction work is needed on the aging highway system in the state of Ohio to maintain a desired level of service for the traveling public. However, temporary work zones on highways disrupt the normal flow of traffic and reduce the level of service. The increasing demand in maintaining an efficient highway system provides the impetus to develop rational and rigorous computer models to help work zone engineers create effective work zone traffic plans. The objectives of the proposed research are to develop new computational models for estimating the work zone capacity and queue length as a function of a large number of factors impacting the work zone and queue length estimation and implement them into a user-friendly interactive object-oriented software system for effective management of traffic in work zones. This research will explore the use of several recent computing and information technologies: a) case-based reasoning (CBR), b) neural networks, c) fuzzy logic, and d) object-orient programming.