On August 20th 2019, David Jared, Assistant Office Head Research Section Chief of the Office of Performance-based Management and Research, held a webinar “Developing Effective GDOT Research Need Statements”.
David discussed the significance and composition of the Research Need Statement. He reviewed the submission and approval processes and timelines. There were also tips and suggestions to optimize RNS submittals.
If you missed the webinar, we’ve posted (links included) the slides and recording on the GTI site.
You can also access other information for the 2019 RNS at the RNS Portal.
The 2022 Georgia Department of Transportation call for Research Needs Statements RNS submission portal will open August 22nd, 2022, and will remain open through September 23rd, 2022 at 5:00 PM EST*.
Developing an effective Research Need Statement (RNS) is critical to successfully undertaking research with GDOT. An RNS is the basic means of initiating a GDOT research project and is required for all research supported through the core GDOT research program. An RNS also represents the basic means of communicating a research need to GDOT technical staff, decision-makers, and sponsoring offices and should be written with all of these groups in mind. An RNS must contain clear statements of need, approach, benefits, and implementation potential. Potential submitters are highly encouraged to review RNS guidelines and relevant other documents on the GTI website prior to submission.
National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP) has issued an invitation for letters of interest from those wishing to be considered as a consultant for one or more of the 19 new NCHRP synthesis topics. Letters of Interest must be submitted through the Letters of Interest Web Portal by August 27, 2019. For the list of new synthesis topics and for information for potential consultants, please visit FY 2019 Synthesis Topics.
Please forward this announcement to others who may be interested. For further information, contact Jo Allen Gause at jagause@nas.edu
Effective August 9, the Research Section of GDOT’s Office of Performance-based Management and Research (OPMR) will move to One Georgia Center in downtown Atlanta.
This move includes the following personnel: David Jared, Supriya Kamatkar, Binh Bui, and Brennan Roney.
Administrative Assistant Amy Ramsey will remain at the Forest Park location temporarily to work on file consolidation and other transition business.
The new physical and mailing address is OPMR/Research Section, One Georgia Center, 5th Floor, 600 W. Peachtree St. NW, Atlanta, GA, 30308.
The email addresses will remain the same.
The phone numbers will change and will be shared in subsequent communications. You may continue to use current lines in the interim, including business cell lines, or contact Ms. Ramsey at 404.608.4796 as needed.
Georgia Transportation Institute welcomed the Director of University of Pennsylvania School of Design’s Center for Safe Mobility Carrie Sauer to speak as part of the Transportation Speaker Series. Streets are designed for vehicle efficiency. Engineers reference vehicle-based codes, use detailed models to optimize traffic flow, and conduct simulations before implementing design. A constraint, rather than a design variable, is pedestrian and cyclist safety, as designers currently lack the ability to quantify and test safety prior to construction. Collecting this missing data is at best challenging and expensive, and at worst, unsafe.
The Center for Safe Mobility fills this gap by using state-of-the-art eye tracking technology to collect and analyze the user-based perspective in situ. This discussion will introduce the Center’s approach to transforming how we measure and understand safety, review eye-tracking methodology and preliminary findings, and discuss opportunities for defining new metrics.
If you missed the presentation or want to rewatch or share it, the YouTube links are provided below.
Georgia Transportation Institute welcomed Frederick R. Dickerson Chair and Professor Dr. Srinivas Peeta to speak as part of the Transportation Speaker Series. Cooperative adaptive cruise control (CACC) strategies being proposed for platoon formation in the connected autonomous vehicle context assume idealized fixed information flow topologies (IFTs) for the platoon, implying guaranteed vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications. In reality, V2V communications are unreliable because of communication-related constraints such as interference and information congestion. Since CACC strategies entail continuous information broadcasting, communication failures can occur in congested traffic networks, leading to a platoon’s IFT varying dynamically. To explicitly factor IFT dynamics and leverage it to enhance the performance of CACC strategies, this study proposes to dynamically optimize the IFT for CACC, labeled the CACC-OIFT strategy. Under it, platoon vehicles cooperatively determine in real-time which vehicles will dynamically deactivate or activate the “send” functionality of their V2V devices to generate IFTs that optimize platoon performance in terms of string stability. CACC-OIFT consists of an IFT optimization model and an adaptive Proportional-Derivative controller. Results from numerical experiments indicate that CACC-OIFT can significantly enhance string stability of platoon control in an unreliable V2V communication context, outperforming CACCs with fixed IFTs or with passive adaptive schemes for IFT dynamics.
If you missed the presentation or want to rewatch or share it, the YouTube links are provided below.
Georgia Transportation Institute welcomed State Traffic Engineer Andrew Heath to speak as part of the Transportation Speaker Series. The presentation provided a discussion and details to the approach taken by the Georgia Department of Transportation, City of Atlanta, Atlanta Police, the Super Host Committee, the NFL, and other stakeholders in managing traffic throughout the 10-day super bowl event. The discussion focused on the evolution and growth of transportation management technology within the Metro Atlanta region and the Downtown Core as guided by multiple significant events and milestones over recent history including the I-85 bridge collapse, the Braves relocation to Suntrust Park, the College Football National Championship, and ultimately Super Bowl LIII.
If you missed the presentation or want to rewatch or share it, the YouTube links are provided below.
The Georgia Department of Transportation has released the list of projects selected from the Fall 2018 RTAG submittals. Congratulations to the selected projects! Thanks to everyone who submitted a Research Needs Statement (RNS). The research community was highly engaged, with approximately 73 submitted needs statements. GDOT research staff is currently contacting the project PIs and setting up the next steps in the process.
The opening of the Fall 2019 RTAG RNS call will be announced later this year. Announcements will be distributed through the GTI mailing list and GTI website.
Please feel free to contact David Jared (djared@dot.ga.gov) if you have any questions regarding the project selection process or Michael Hunter (michael.hunter@ce.gatech.edu) if you have any questions regarding GTI.
Project Title (Abbreviated)
Research Team
1
Improved Disaster Management through Automated Damage Assessment Using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs)
Ga. Southern
2
Phase II Long-Term Bridge Asset Valuation and Performance Forecasting Using Element-Based Inspection Data
UGA
3
Sustainable Waste Management through the Beneficial Use of Dredge Materials in Partnership with the City of Savannah
Ga. Southern
4
Phase II: Investigation and Guidelines for Best Practices of Mass Concrete Construction Management
Ga. Tech
5
Phase 2: Enhancement and Restoration Interventions for Bird-Long Island Shoreline Alternatives: Design and Modeling for Stewardship
UGA
6
LRFD Procedure for Driven Piles with Pre-Drilling on Rock
Ga. Southern
7
Investigation and Guideline for Drilled Shaft Excavation Inspections
KSU
8
GDOT360: A 360 Immersive Virtual Platform to Visualize Current and Future GDOT Projects
Ga. Tech/Univ. of Florida
9
Entrusted Engineer-in-Charge: A New Critical Position in the Design-Build Team to Enhance the State of Practice in Engineering Design Decision-Making in the Innovative Project Delivery Environment
“Continuum Dynamic Traffic Assignment Using the Macroscopic Fundamental Diagram of Urban Networks”
ABSTRACT: This presentation focuses on a formulation of the reactive dynamic user equilibrium problem in continuum form using a network-level Macroscopic Fundamental Diagram (MFD). Compared to existing continuum models for cities — all based in Hughes’ pedestrian model in 2002 — the proposed formulation (i) is consistent with reservoir-type models of the MFD literature, shedding some light into the connection between these two modeling approaches,(ii) can have origins and destinations continuously distributed on the region, and (iii) can incorporate multi-commodity flows without additional numerical error. The proposed multi-reservoir numerical solution method treats the multi-commodity component of the model in Lagrangian coordinates, which is the natural representation to propagate origin-destination information (and any vehicle-specific characteristic) through the traffic stream. Fluxes between reservoir boundaries are computed in the Eulerian representation, and are used to calculate the speed of vehicles crossing the boundary. Simple examples are included that show the convergence of the model and its agreements with the available analytical solutions. We find that (i) when origins and destinations are uniformly distributed in a region, the distribution of the travel times is given by a one parameter scaling of the free-flow travel time distribution, (ii) the magnitude of the detours from the optimal free-flow route due to congestion increase linearly with the inflow and decreases with the square of the speed, and (iii) the total delay of vehicles in the network converges to the analytical approximation when the size of reservoirs tends to zero.
BIO: Jorge Laval is an Associate Professor at the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering since 2006. After obtaining his B.S. in Civil and Industrial Engineering from Universidad Catolica de Chile in 1995, Dr. Laval worked as a transportation engineer for 5 years at the Chilean Ministry of Public Works in Santiago, Chile. He received his Ph.D. in Civil Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley in 2004. Prior to joining Georgia Tech, Dr. Laval held two consecutive one-year postdoctoral positions at the Institute of Transportation Studies at UC Berkeley, and at the French National Institute for Safety and Transportation Research (INRETS/ENTPE). Professor Laval’s main research thrust is in the area of traffic flow theory, modeling and simulation, focusing in understanding congestion in urban networks and how to manage it. He has made important contributions towards understanding the capacity of freeways, the connection between driver behavior and stop-and-go waves, freeway ramp-metering strategies, dynamic traffic assignment and congestion pricing.
The transportation system is evolving rapidly. There are many competing visions of future transportation systems and various public and private decisions related to both policies and allocation of resources will significantly impact this evolution. An important element that needs to be considered in these decisions is how these future visions will impact human health and safety. Unfortunately, many of the tools and analytical techniques that are used to evaluate the current transportation system may be poorly suited to estimate the health and safety impacts of many of these transportation futures. In this talk we will examine both the limitations of current risk-exposure models and discuss other methods by which these assessments can be made.
Bio:
Dr. Michael O. Rodgers of the Georgia Tech School of Civil and Environmental Engineering was recently named a Regents Researcher, the University System of Georgia’s highest research distinction. Dr. Rodgers’ research currently focuses on the application of quantitative methods to problems related to energy, the environment and transportation safety. Over his career, Dr. Rodgers has led or participated in more than 150 research programs for NASA; U.S. EPA; NSF; NOAA; U.S. DOT, Georgia DOT, U.S. DOE and other organizations. He received his B.S. (1976) and M.S. (1978) degrees in Physics and Ph.D. in Geophysical Sciences (1986) all from Georgia Institute of Technology. Dr. Rodgers was the founding director of the Georgia Tech Air Quality Laboratory and led or was a major participant in number of major studies for U.S. EPA (Southern Oxidants Study, Next Generation Emissions Model Development); NASA (Pacific Exploratory Missions (PEM-Tropics and PEM-West)) and NOAA (Global Tropospheric Experiment). The PEM-West project was honored by the Administrators Group Achievement Award, NASA’s highest award for scientific achievement in a project or program. Results from Dr. Rodgers’ research have been described in his more than 200 refereed publications and several hundred other reports. His research has won numerous awards including the Pyke Johnson Award from the Transportation Research Board; Professional of the Year from the American Lung Association; the Steven J Ressler Award from the American Society for Engineering Education. He is also a two-time winner (2012 and 2017) of the Thomas Evans award from ASEE. For these and other accomplishments, Dr. Rodgers was named a Georgia Tech Institute Fellow in 1994 and as one of the inaugural GTRI Technical Fellows in 2009. In 2014, Dr. Rodgers was named Outstanding Undergraduate Educator at Georgia Institute of Technology by the Center for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning.
