Developing a Reliable and Resilient Freeway Network

A Distinguished Warren Lecture with
Eli Kwon

Civil Engineering, University of Minnesota Duluth

ABSTRACT
The ultimate challenge facing transportation engineers is developing and maintaining a reliable and resilient freeway network, which can absorb and adapt to various traffic disturbances and recover from congestion with maximum efficiency. The key elements in developing such a resilient freeway network include: 1) the capability to monitor and assess the performance of traffic flows under different operating conditions at a corridor level, 2) a set of the traffic-management strategies that can optimize the corridor-wide traffic performance under time-variant geometric/operational environment, and 3) the corridor-wide geometry structure that can maximize the operational resilience of a given corridor- traffic system in dealing with both normal and abnormal traffic patterns. To address the above issues, several research projects have been conducted at the University of Minnesota Duluth (UMD) in cooperation with the Minnesota Department of Transportation (MnDOT). In this seminar, Eli Kwon presents the results from some of those projects. First, a comprehensive traffic-performance estimation system, called TeTRES (Travel Time Reliability and Performance Estimation System), and its applications will be presented. TeTRES integrates a set of traffic and non-traffic data, such as weather, incidents, work zones, and special events, and then automatically calculates a set of travel-time reliability and traffic-flow measures, such as Buffer Index and Vehicle-Miles-Travelled, for the selected corridors under user-specified operating conditions, e.g., weather, incidents, etc. Next, the adaptive ramp-metering system, developed at UMD and currently in operation in the Twin Cities’ freeway network, will be discussed along with the history of ramp metering in Minnesota. The work-zone variable-speed limit system, officially adopted as one of the work-zone tools at MnDOT, will be also introduced. Finally, the results from the recently completed research to quantify the operational resilience of freeway corridors will be presented.

SPEAKER
Dr. Eil Kwon is currently a professor of Transportation Engineering at the Department of Civil Engineering, University of Minnesota Duluth (UMD). He received his BS degree in Civil Engineering from Sungkyunkwan University, South Korea, in 1978, and finished his Ph.D. study in Transportation Engineering from the University of Minnesota in December 1989. Before he started his graduate study at UMN, he worked for the Ministry of Transportation, South Korea, as an assistant director for 6 years. After completing his post-doctoral fellowship at the Civil/Environmental Engineering, UMN, Kwon’s professional career started at the Center for Transportation Studies, UMN, where he worked for 10 years as the Advanced Traffic Systems Program director. After that he taught briefly at the Minnesota State University, Mankato, as an associate professor before he joined the Minnesota Department of Transportation as the Traffic-Research Director. He worked for MnDOT for 4 years until 2006, when he started his current position at the UMD, as a Professor and the Director of the Northland Advanced Transportation Systems Research Laboratory, which was the federally funded research program at UMD in the areas of Intelligent Transportation Systems. He’s been with UMD since 2006 as a Professor in the Civil Engineering Department. Kwon’s research has been focusing on traffic-system design/operations for both freeways and arterials. His specific research areas include modelling and simulation of traffic flows, adaptive ramp metering and signal control, freeway work-zone management strategies including variable-speed limit control, on-line prediction of traffic demand and diversion, capacity estimation of freeway bottlenecks and roundabouts, emergency-evacuation strategies for a large network and modelling operational resilience of freeway corridors.

Keywords: Resiliency, Traffic Performance, Ramp Metering