01137538

Component

The sheer volume of data associated with a single transportation incident is difficult to fully comprehend, and existing incident management systems often fail to equip users with the necessary tools make sense of this data. The consequences of delayed decision making, misinterpreting data, or even overlooking pertinent information can be life threatening. A tool that gives the incident manager the ability to grasp the entire picture of an incident in a minimal amount of time is essential to facilitate quick and accurate decision making. The Transportation Incident Management Explorer (TIME) provides for the visualization of real-time and historic traffic management center incident data. All data pertinent to an incident can be viewed in a compact graphical overview. Temporal data are rendered as timelines where color and length convey information that would otherwise take significantly more space to display and more time to understand. The mouse can be used to scroll over elements in the timeline to glean additional information. Geospatial data are plotted on an interactive map, providing users freedom to explore regions affected by an incident. TIME reduces the chance of missing critical information, enables users to correlate events, and quickens the time needed to comprehend the many simultaneous events that occur or occurred during the management of an incident. This paper describes the use of the TIME tool when visualizing real-time and archived incident data collected and provided by the Maryland CHART, Washington, D.C., and Northern Virginia Traffic Management Centers.

01120148

09-2895

English

16p

2009

Transportation Research Board 88th Annual Meeting

DVD

Figures (9) ; References (11)

Data banks; Decision support systems; Graphical user interfaces; Incident management; Information management; Location; Real time information; Time intervals; Visualization

Data and Information Technology; Highways; I10: Economics and Administration; I73: Traffic Control

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2009 Paper #09-2895

BTRIS, TRIS, TRB

Jan 30 2009 7:16PM