Surveillance and Delay Advisory System

This report documents the development and testing of a Surveillance and Delay Advisory System (SDAS) for application in congested rural areas. SDAS included several techniques that could be used on rural highways to give travelers advance information on congestion on the road ahead of them. It is designed to address congestion problems at work zones or at approaches to major attractions. Important considerations for its design are reliability, level of maintenance, and cost. The SDAS employs three different data collection technologies to collect travel time information: weigh-in-motion, video, and radar subsystems. The system gathers data from a test zone, computes travel times, and transmits delay messages to motorists who are headed toward the zone. Important observations were made concerning all subsystems: some methods for detection and operation gave clearly superior results in either accuracy or reliability.