Towards Connected Smart Work Zones: Advancing Work Zone Management Through Improved Connectivity

Work zones play a key role in road and highway maintenance but can lead to significant risks to both drivers and workers. Smart Work Zones (SWZs) have emerged as a potential solution, offering decision-makers real-time insights into the status of the work zone. By utilizing work zone barrels equipped with sensors and communication nodes, SWZs facilitate collecting and transmitting critical data, including location, traffic density, flow patterns, and worker proximity alerts. In collaboration with the Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT), this study addresses work zone barrel connectivity requirements while considering a cost-effective, low-power, and low-maintenance solution. While the broader project aimed to create a complete SWZ system for the localization of work zone barrels, this paper proposes a novel relay node selection algorithm integrated with Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) technology to enhance network performance. The proposed algorithm enhances the communication network performance by selecting specific nodes as relay points, avoiding message flooding in the network. It demonstrates an improvement in message delivery rates, achieving up to a 40% increase over existing methods while ensuring balanced load distribution among nodes. Moreover, it maintains an 80% message delivery rate while minimizing power consumption, outperforming other approaches. This improvement in communication efficiency is critical, as it ensures the accurate transmission and delivery of vital work zone data, allowing for faster and more informed decisions to enhance work zone safety and management.