Staff Responsibility: David Plazak

Extensive, high-quality data resources are critical to the understanding of nonrecurring congestion and travel time reliability. The reliability travel times of transportation facilities and of trips between origins and destinations can only be assessed in the context of a statistical distribution of travel times. A number of factors impact travel times on a day-to-day basis, including fluctuations in travel demand, inadequate base capacity, weather, traffic incidents, special events, work zones, and poorly-functioning traffic control devices. Months and months of travel time data and related data, such as weather conditions, are needed to understand reliability problems and how they can be addressed on a regional or corridor basis.

The objective of this project was to determine the feasibility of developing, operating, and maintaining a system to make data from SHRP 2 Reliability projects and other related projects readily available to researchers and practitioners. This included determining the basic requirements and lifecycle costs for storing and delivering such data for more than 25 years.

The project established several alternative information technology architectures that could be utilized to develop an online reliability data archive and analyzed the advantages, disadvantages, and costs of each system. The project also recommended a solution based around cloud computing data storage and a mixture of open source and commercial, off-the-shelf software. This alternative was further assessed through the construction of a prototype data archive. The prototype archive was populated with a variety of data from SHRP 2 Reliability Project L03, which created a large quantity of data holdings of different types. Project L13 determined that a SHRP 2 Reliability Data Archive is feasible and recommended that the SHRP 2 program move ahead with projects to design, build, and populate an online archive for the Reliability focus area. Work on the data archive will be under way in 2011; it will ultimately be populated with data from all of the SHRP 2 Reliability research projects and closely-related projects from other SHRP 2 research focus areas. The follow-on project to build and populate the archive is L13A (Design and Implement a System for Archiving and Disseminating Data from SHRP 2 Reliabilities and Related Studies/Assistance to Contractors to Archive their Data for Reliability Projects).

Status: The project is complete.

Product Availability: The final report, S2-L13-RW-1: Requirements and Feasibility of a System for Archiving and Disseminating Data from SHRP 2 Reliability and Related Studies, is available as an Adobe PDF document.