Start Date:
-Summary:
Crowdsourcing has been identified as one of the top trends and technologies that traffic management agencies can adapt and take advantage of from outside the transportation community to improve data quality, coverage, and cost. The growth in popular social networking tools is apparent in transportation, and many agencies employ social media as a customer networking resource but not a major source of real time information. The amount of information that can be generated, communicated and processed in real time by these systems will significantly impact TMC operations in the years to come. Transportation Management Centers (TMCs) should consider using the data from social media and turn it into information to support decision making in an operational context. The promise of advances in the ability to extract meaningful information from social media platforms and other ways to gather crowdsourced data for TMCs will undoubtedly make transportation safer and more efficient.
The purpose of this webinar is to assess the opportunity for agencies to work with crowdsourced data. The webinar features four case studies, presented by knowledgeable agency staff who will describe examples of active projects from different states to integrate crowdsourced data into TMC operations.
Learning Objectives:
Attendees of the webinar will expect to learn about:
- Real-world examples of the different ways that State DOTs have implemented crowdsourced data to enhance TMC operations.
- Guidance on the use of a SWOT analysis framework to assist with developing a value proposition, business case, or other information that could be used to justify a crowdsourced data project.
- Concepts, methods, processes, tasks, techniques, and other related issues for practitioners to consider associated with analyzing crowdsourced data.
Cost:
Course Credit Requirements:
Instructors:
John Horner will present the highlights from the state of the practice review for TMC use of crowdsourced data, focusing on the findings from the study’s survey, interviews, and workshop.
Sinclair Stolle will discuss the case study in Iowa Department of Transportation (IDOT). IDOT has a strong social media engagement program. It has grown to be a great asset in using it to gather and respond to information on traffic operations in Iowa.
Rakesh Nune will discuss social media initiative taken by District of Columbia Department of Transportation (DDOT). As a part of the research program, DDOT looked at extracting and analyzing social media for incident management and incident collection. This is relatively a new concept and not much literature was available to do it. A new algorithm was developed to carefully retrieve incident tweets from the twitter stream. The algorithm extracts the right geographically based key words and ranks them based on the relevance to get traffic information. The project work was presented at TRB 2015 Annual Meeting.
Elizabeth Birriel will discuss Florida Department of Transportation’s (FDOT’s) experience with integrating WAZE data into Transportation Management Center operations and the Florida 511 Traveler Information System.
Lisa Miller will discuss the Utah Department of Transportation (UDOT) Citizen Reporter program. This program was launched in 2012 as a way to get additional information on road conditions through Utah. Since its launch, UDOT has gathered thousands of reports from trained citizens who submit road/weather data through an industry-first smartphone app. Additional program enhancements are planned for the future.
Jeff Adler will present a Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT) model framework to provide guidance for agencies who want to advance crowdsourced data projects. Within the SWOT model, the strengths and weaknesses are used to assess the internal readiness of a TMC. Focus is on the operational, institutional, and technical considerations that would influence how successful an agency would be in planning and executing crowdsourced data projects.
Target Audience:
- ITS and TMC Program Managers, consultants, vendors, academia, and government officials, including local, State, Federal and DOTs, and any other individuals or entities involved in TMC operations
- Those wanting to learn more about transportation agency use of social media and crowdsourced data.