New Export and Data Quality Functions in ATR-TDA and SC-TDA Software Applications for Use with Regional Transportation Management Center Sensor Data

Project summary:

During 2009, software utilities were migrated from the UMD server to a PC within MnDOT's Transportation Data and Analysis (TDA) Office by Professor Taek Kwon. The two software utilities, named "ATR-TDA" and "SC-TDA," have served to generate automatic traffic recorder (ATR) and short-duration count (SC) data from Regional Traffic Management Center (RTMC) loop data in a format used as inputs for TDA applications written in SAS or RBASE. Recently, TRADAS, a traffic data processing, analysis, and reporting system created by Chaparral Systems, has been chosen to replace several legacy systems including the SAS and RBASE applications served by ATR-TDA and SC-TDA. However, in order to load the ATR and SC data to TRADAS, the ATR-TDA and SC-TDA application programming must be modified to produce TRADAS-acceptable data formats. The primary objectives of this project are 1) to add new export functions to prepare for more complete traffic data integration with TRADAS; and 2)to change the SC-TDA software to implement a strategy for dealing with consecutive zeros in the RTMC loop data. The strategy was developed working with MnDOT TDA staff.