Applied Research is an integral component of the Connected Corridors program. The UC Berkeley faculty and researchers on the Connected Corridors team have investigated a range of topics related to ICM, including highway and arterial estimation and modeling, demand management, corridor-level control (ramp metering, signal synchronization, rerouting), safety, route change incentivization, security, and more. This work informs such key aspects of ICM development as a decision support system (DSS), traveler information, and analysis, modeling, and simulation (AMS).

The Connected Corridors research efforts build on previous Caltrans projects initially carried out by PATH at UC Berkeley:

  • Performance Measurement System (PeMS) — PeMS is an on-line system that provides map-based traffic data in real time. It also provides diagnostics, imputation for missing values, speed calculations, etc. The PeMS website is here: http://pems.dot.ca.gov(link is external)
  • Tools for Operational Planning (TOPL) — TOPL predicts traffic conditions given changes to ramp metering, lanes, etc. It was designed to assist corridor managers in making decisions and is web-based for easy access.
  • Mobile Century/Mobile Millennium — Mobile Millenium, which followed the Mobile Century project, was the first use of crowd-sourced cellphones to collect traffic data. The Mobile Millennium website is here: http://traffic.berkeley.edu/(link is external)
  • Data Quality and Hybridization — This project researched commercial traffic information sources and the quality standards and data formats that government should require in order to purchase traffic data.

Connected Corridors brings the data-gathering and estimation functions provided by PeMS (loop data) and Mobile Millennium (mobile data) together with the macro modeling capabilities of TOPL and carries each of these forward in an integrated way, adding aspects of demand data and demand management. Recent work, for example, has focused on real-time origin-destination determination using cell tower data. This has the potential to revolutionize multiple aspects of traffic management and has received strong interest from the practitioner community.

Use the links in the sidebar to access the research presented in journal articles, conference proceedings, and other publications, as well as software toolkits and datasets available for downloading. For an overview of research results, see Summary of Research.