Overview
Reliability is defined in this report as consistency of travel times for a particular trip. Travelers tend to estimate how long a trip will take based on parameters such as distance, time of day, and their own experience. Impacts to the transportation network that cause unexpected delays introduce uncertainty in travel time reliability.
The SHRP 2 Reliability focus area addresses reliability by developing specific procedures, monitoring programs, and exploring alternatives to traditional traffic management strategies. The L01 project focused on processes that directly affect network and travel time reliability, particularly those processes that enable operational functions and in which integration plays a significant part. The project identified the core of operations business processes within transportation management that had day-to-day influence over operations and network performance and, in turn, had positive impacts on travel time reliability.
The project defined “business process” as a series of actions or activities that result in a specific or desired outcome to accomplish a specific organizational goal. There are many definitions of business processes, but in general these emphasize inputs, outputs, sequences of events, and value-added results. The research focused on business process analysis that was narrowed to key operational areas that have the most effect on travel time reliability. These included the following areas:
- Incident management;
- Work zone management;
- Planned special-event management;
- Road weather management; and
- Traffic control and traffic operations.
The following were the key research objectives for this project:
- Identify and document practices that successfully integrated business processes to improve travel time reliability;
- Define key business processes within DOT and transportation operations that were linked to travel time reliability;
- Demonstrate how successful strategies and business process integration activities may be adopted by other entities;
- Help agency managers identify critical gaps in their current processes, as well as strategies to address these gaps, including combining and integrating processes to achieve greater travel time reliability; and
- Coordinate L01 research activities with other ongoing research within the SHRP 2 Reliability focus area to extract the most innovative case study examples.
Related Artifacts: Project L34 e-Tool (Java), Project L34 e-Tool (Windows 7), Project L34 e-Tool (Windows XP and Vista)