Migration of ATR and Short-Duration Traffic Data Warehouse at UMD Data Center to Mn/DOT TDA

Project summary:

Since completion of the research project titled "TMC Traffic Data Automation for Mn/DOT's Traffic Monitoring Program" sponsored by the Minnesota Department of Transportation (Mn/DOT), the Traffic Demand Research Laboratory has provided the Automatic Traffic Recorder (ATR) and short-duration traffic data for the portion of the Regional Transportation Management Center (RTMC) traffic data. For this data service, the UMD Data Center created a data warehouse for the respective traffic data and has continuously maintained the software, hardware, network, and other physical and electrical facilities required for the data service. With seven years of experience in testing and maintaining this data, both the UMD Data Center and the Office of Transportation Data and Analysis (TDA) at Mn/DOT agree that the current system is sufficiently stable and is ready to migrate to a Mn/DOT TDA facility. There are two possible approaches in this migration. The first one is to pursue migration of the whole data warehouse to Mn/DOT. This approach is expensive in terms of the actual cost and maintenance requirements. The second approach, which is pursued in this project, is to perform a customized migration. In this approach, the data services are reestablished through a single general-purpose PC instead of a network of UNIX servers and command lines. Also, all pieces of software are integrated into two programs: one for the ATR data service and the other for the short-duration data service. This approach is much less expensive to Mn/DOT, while providing a platform that is easy to maintain. This customization requires significant modification of the original software to adapt to the present Mn/DOT networking and storage environment. The converted software will be extensively tested and debugged to ensure a reliable transition. At the end of the project, equivalent automated data services will be reestablished at Mn/DOT TDA.