Message from the Managing Director
By Tom Kern 

Last week I attended the Texas A&M Transportation Technology Conference in College Station, Texas. The agenda was filled with a series of discussions involving innovating, testing, and deploying advanced transportation technologies. It was also a celebratory moment for Texas A&M with its announcement of “the largest investment in the history" of the University to dramatically expand engineering and educational resources at the 2,000-acre RELLIS Campus and include key infrastructure for the development and testing of various connected and automated transportation technologies.
 
At the conference, I was most struck by the underlining emphasis on the three Cs:  A Collaborative community to Enhance Transportation Technology Research and Deployment, Capture of Developing Knowledge in the Field, and Communication and Knowledge Sharing.  Although these terms have become ubiquitous and almost commonplace, their value remains real for those who can meaningfully apply them. When I ask those who do these things well about their approach, a common thread emerges.

• Those who collaborate well think hard upfront about who to work with, define what collaboration means and what is expected from it, and respect and keep to the process.
• Those who capture knowledge well sweat the details, assembling it for internal validation and use, but also for greater access and sharing.
• Those who communicate well appreciate that different audiences need different messages, that repetition is essential to ensure impact, and that effective communication begins with the end in mind: the outcomes to be achieved. 

There is another C embedded in what has been a dramatic surge in innovative transportation technology in the last decade: Continuous learning. So much of what has been accomplished in recent years has depended on building on what works, learning from what doesn’t, and creatively overturning the apple cart from time to time because of the disruptively important innovations that have emerged not only in transportation, but in other sectors whose lessons spill over into others. 

The Texas Conference embodied this spirit and the lesson for us all is to keep pressing forward—our very lives and economic prosperity are at stake!

Call for Feedback: NOCoE 2016-2017 Business Plan 
By Steven Lavrenz, PhD, EIT, NOCoE Technical Services Manager

Since joining NOCoE as the Technical Services Manager in January 2016, I have had the great fortune to participate in a diversity of technical service offerings through the Center – from webinars and Knowledge Center content development, to peer exchanges and workshops (such as the Salt Lake City workshop on Automated Traffic Signal Performance Measures in January, pictured here).

I have witnessed the immense value that many of these services provide to practitioners in the TSMO community, and have received lots of great feedback from participants on how to make improvements for the future. As the 2015-2016 NOCoE Technical Services Plan comes to a close on June 30^th, I and the rest of the NOCoE staff are hard at work utilizing this feedback to refine our host of technical service offerings for 2016-2017. Please click here to read more. 

USDOT Updates the CVRIA and the Systems Engineering Tool for Intelligent Transportation 
The U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) Intelligent Transportation Systems Joint Program Office (ITS JPO) is pleased to announce that the Connected Vehicle Reference Implementation Architecture (CVRIA) and the Systems Engineering Tool for Intelligent Transportation (SET-IT) have been updated to Version 2.2 and are now available at the CVRIA website: http://www.iteris.com/cvria/. 

Upcoming Event: I-95 Corridor Coalition Conference 
The I-95 Corridor Coalition is hosting a conference,“Connected & Automated Vehicles (CAV): What States Need to Know” on June 21-22, 2016, at the Maritime Institute in Maryland. The conference is uniquely designed to:

• Highlight how CAV will affect our transportation system;
• Provide an overview of lessons learned from around the country;
• Describe current efforts underway within select Coalition states; and,
• Share insights from State DOT executives, NHTSA, the insurance industry and auto manufacturers. 

 Reserve your spot now – as an attendee, sponsor, or exhibitor – click here for details, or visit the Coalition’s website at www.i95coalition.org. T

New Connected Vehicle Data Environments Now Available on the Research Data Exchange 
The Research Data Exchange (RDE) is a web-based data resource provided by the USDOT Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) Program. It collects, manages, and provides access to archived and real-time multi-source and multi-modal data to support the development and testing of ITS applications. The RDE now houses the following three additional data environments: Multi-Modal Intelligent Traffic Signal Systems (MMITSS), Basic Safety Message (BSM) Emulator, and Leesburg VA Vehicle Awareness Device. Please click here to read more.

Register with NOCoE and Join the Discussion Forums!

We hope you find the NOCoE (http://www.transportationops.org/) a place where you can share information as well as receive it – we encourage you to register and share in our discussion forum your latest work plan, specific challenge you are facing with an operations practice or new technology, or techniques you’ve used to empower your staff. This is your transportation operations resource and we are interested in your feedback to continually improve our portfolio of services. Please feel free to contact the Center with your suggestions, either through the website or at TKERN@transportationops.org.