Praveen Edara's research while affiliated with University of Missouri and other places
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Publications (85)
Evacuation traffic management has been implemented in large-scale disaster evacuations (such as hurricanes) to facilitate traffic flow and reduce travel delay. The outcomes of these strategies were quantified via traffic simulation but were assumed to have no/limited impacts on households' evacuation-related decisions. This study analyzed and model...
Effective evacuation management plans can help reduce the negative impacts of disasters. Understanding evacuee travel behavior is critical for the design of evacuation plans. In this paper, we explore which factors contribute to evacuees selecting freeway vs. non-freeway evacuation routes. Freeways are of particular interest due to their ability to...
Sleep disorders and various acute and chronic medical conditions affect the quality and quantity of an individual’s sleep causing excessive day time sleepiness. This study examined the relationship between clinical sleep disorders (i.e., shift work sleep disorder (SWSD), sleep apnea and insomnia) and crashes using naturalistic driving study data. U...
Car crashes can occur in a variety of ways. A common type of collision involving two vehicles is when one vehicle rear-ends another vehicle. This study describes a methodology to understand the braking judgments in rear-end safety-critical events, i.e., crashes and near-crashes, using naturalistic driving study (NDS) data collected as part of USDOT...
Can virtual reality tools be used to train engineers that inspect work zones? In this paper, we share the findings of a research project that developed an interactive and immersive training platform using virtual reality to train state department of transportation (DOT) staff that inspect work zones for compliance. Virtual reality offers an immersi...
Work zones are prevalent in the United States as the infrastructure is increasingly in need of maintenance. Lack of reliable data is one of the main obstacles in work zone research. Reliability suffers because of underreporting of crashes and inclusion in the analysis of irrelevant activities that are not attributable to work zones. In addition, th...
The naturalistic driving study (NDS) data offers a rare opportunity for a first-hand view of crashes and near-crashes (CNC) that occur around work zones. The objective of this study is twofold: 1) evaluate risk of CNC using pre-incident variables using logistical regression models and; 2) classify and predict CNC events using machine learning metho...
Abstract
Can virtual reality tools be used to train engineers that inspect work zones? In this report, we share the findings of a research project that developed an interactive and immersive training platform using virtual reality to train state department of transportation (DOT) staff that inspect work zones for compliance. Virtual reality offers...
Mobile work zones for various types of moving operations (e.g., striping, pothole patching, sweeping) are an important component in highway maintenance activities which have particular safety issues. To help mitigate the risk and severity of collisions, a truck-mounted attenuator (TMA) is attached to a construction vehicle, typically equipped with...
Identification of crash risk factors and enhancing safety at work zones is a major priority for transportation agencies. There is a critical need for collecting comprehensive data related to work zone safety. The naturalistic driving study (NDS) data offers a rare opportunity for a first-hand view of crashes and near-crashes (CNC) that occur in and...
In recent years, deep learning models have been receiving increased attention within the artificial intelligence (AI) community because of their high prediction accuracy. In this paper, two deep learning models, long short-term memory (LSTM) and convolutional neural network (CNN), are proposed to predict travel time in a road network. One major adv...
There are various ways in which a transportation agency can approach safety prediction. One could calibrate the Highway Safety Manual (HSM) using adjustment factors by ranges of exposure variable, calibrate it using a function, or develop jurisdiction-specific models. Various tradeoffs are involved in deciding on which approach to undertake, includ...
The Highway Safety Manual (HSM) provides guidance and tools to conduct quantitative safety analysis. Crash prediction models are used to estimate the expected number of crashes per year, by facility type, severity, and crash type. There are two approaches for applying the HSM crash prediction methodology to local conditions: (1) calibration of mode...
What effect does work activity type have on traffic conditions in a work zone? This question has still not been answered satisfactorily in practice. Without knowing the true effect a work activity has on traffic, practitioners are forced to make assumptions while scheduling work. This paper attempts to answer this question by studying the traffic f...
The current Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) safety risk management (SRM) process in the United States involves mainly the use of qualitative risk measures. The development of accurate quantitative models could complement existing qualitative analysis. This paper discusses quantitative models in the form of airfield incursion models (AIM) to...
A reservation-based intersection control algorithm was implemented for hurricane evacuation in a connected and autonomous vehicle environment. The autonomous reservation-based intersection control (AReBIC) algorithm receives and processes reservation requests from approaching vehicles in real-time and routes them free of conflict. The proposed algo...
At the airfield in hub airports, many activities occur that involve a range of participants, including various-size aircraft, ground vehicles, and workers. The safety management system is FAA's approach for systematically managing aviation safety. A major component of the safety management system is safety risk management (SRM), which entails analy...
How safe are the ramp terminals of a diverging diamond interchange (DDI)? This paper answered this question using data from DDI sites in Missouri. First, crash prediction models for ramp terminals for different crash severities were developed. These models were then utilized in the Empirical Bayes (EB) evaluation of DDI ramp terminals. Due to incon...
Owing to the J-turn’s safety effectiveness, it has become a viable alternative to replace high-crash, two-way, stop-controlled intersections on high-speed expressways. National guidance on the design of J-turns on high-speed highways is limited. What is the safety effect of spacing between the intersection and the U-turn? Under what circumstances i...
The J-turn, also known as the restricted crossing U-turn and Superstreet, is an innovative geometric design that can improve intersection safety. Although this design has been in use in several states for many years, there is very little research-based guidance for several design parameters. A driving simulator study was conducted to analyze the pa...
Recent evidence has shown that the diverging diamond interchange (DDI) design improves the safety of the ramp terminals and the overall safety of the interchange. What is still not known is the safety effect that a DDI has on adjacent intersections and the speed-change lanes (SCLs) at freeway entrances and exits. This study addressed this void by e...
Vehicle drivers continuously make decisions and execute them while driving on a roadway. It requires perception, comprehension and prediction of roadway conditions. Studies show that the decision-making process and driver performance greatly depends on situational awareness. Drivers intend to operate vehicles at safe speed based on the roadway geom...
Current hurricane evacuation plans of coastal states in the United States do not actively coordinate the provision of contraflow access points and ramp closure locations on evacuation routes. In this paper, contraflow and ramp closure techniques are integrated and optimized to achieve higher evacuation efficiency. A simulation-based optimization fr...
Objective:
Red light cameras (RLCs) have generated heated discussions over issues of safety effectiveness, revenue generation, and procedural due process. This study focuses on the safety evaluation of RLCs in Missouri, including the economic valuation of safety benefits. The publication of the national Highway Safety Manual (HSM; American Associa...
The effectiveness of variable ‘advisory’ speed limit (VASL) systems in congested urban work zones was investigated. Except for one publication, all previous studies focused on regulatory speed limit systems. This study used a comprehensive set of performance measures to investigate VASL effectiveness. Four congested work zones with lanes reduced fr...
In an effort to improve the safety and capacity of existing roads, many transportation practitioners are implementing innovative designs at intersections and interchanges. The development of construction phasing plans for these projects is a critical component for maintaining safety and mobility on the facility during construction. The goal of this...
Diverging diamond interchanges (DDIs) are increasingly popular because they provide improved traffic operations and cost savings. On the basis of theory, DDIs should be safer than conventional diamonds, but previous empirical safety studies have been limited. The objectives of this work were, therefore, to conduct a broader safety evaluation of DDI...
A site-specific analysis of the safety of diverging diamond interchange (DDI) ramp terminals was conducted for the first time. Crash modification factors (CMFs) were developed for DDI ramp terminals for different crash severity levels. The ramp terminal CMFs complement the project-level DDI CMFs developed in previous research. The study used data f...
Most crashes on high-speed rural expressways occur at intersections with minor roads. Through and left-turn movements on minor roads are especially susceptible. One low-cost alternative for improving safety of at-grade intersections on such expressways is the J-turn. This study evaluated the effectiveness of unsignalized J-turn intersection design...
Signage plays an important role in work zones to provide guidance to drivers under changed conditions. This study investigated the safety effect of an alternative merge sign configuration in a freeway work zone. In this alternative configuration, the graphical-only lane closed sign from the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD) was comp...
None of numerous existing traffic flow forecasting models focus on work zones. Work zone events create conditions that are different from both normal operating conditions and incident conditions. In this paper, four models were developed for forecasting traffic flow for planned work zone events. The four models are random forest, regression tree, m...
Ridesharing has a long, storied history, beginning as carsharing clubs during World War II and evolving into the current technologically savvy communities. Ridesharing has traditionally enjoyed the support of public agencies at all levels of government because of the potential gains in congestion relief and environmental sustainability. However, th...
A contraflow facility, in which the direction of traffic on one or more travel lanes is reversed to increase outbound capacity, is a major component of hurricane evacuation plans in many coastal states. Contraflow facilities typically are implemented when significant evacuation demand is expected (e.g., during a severe hurricane). Typical contraflo...
Connected vehicle technology offers great potential to improve the safety and the mobility of a transportation system. Probe data collection is one feature of connected vehicle technology in which vehicles collect information such as their location and speed. Probe data could be used to support various traffic management and traveler information ap...
Variable speed limit (VSL) systems have been more widely implemented in Europe compared to the United States. Studies have demonstrated positive safety impacts of such systems; however, there are very few studies that used actual deployment data to investigate the operational benefits of VSL systems. This article presents the operational impacts of...
A lane changing assistance system that advises drivers of safe gaps for making mandatory lane changes at lane drops is developed. Bayes classifier and decision-tree methods were applied to model lane changes. Detailed vehicle trajectory data from the Next Generation Simulation (NGSIM) data set were used for model development (U.S. Highway 101) and...
The evaluation of dynamic message signs (DMSs) has been challenging to undertake because of the difficulty of identifying the effects of DMSs from traffic patterns. The primary contribution of this study is the comprehensive evaluation of DMSs in a rural area during a full freeway closure by using field data, driver surveys, and simulation. A full...
Incentive/disincentive clauses (I/D) are designed to award payments to contractors if they complete work ahead of schedule and to deduct payments if they exceed the completion time. A previously unanswered question is, Did the costs of the actual work zone impacts that were avoided justify the incentives paid? This paper answers that question affir...
The objective of this paper is to illustrate the sensitivity of evacuation travel time estimates in relation to assumptions about evacuee route choice behavior. The user equilibrium (UE) assignment procedure in which evacuees are assumed to choose the shortest (or fastest) path from their origins to destinations is considered as the base case. Few...
Ramp metering has been successfully implemented in many states to improve traffic operations on freeways. Studies have documented the positive mobility and safety benefits of ramp metering. However, there have been no studies on the use of ramp metering for work zones. This paper reports the results from the first deployment of temporary ramp meter...
Vehicle-to-infrastructure (VTI) communication technology offers great potential to improve safety and mobility in transportation systems. One application of VTI communication to mobility is the measurement of travel time in an urban road network. The presence of traffic control at intersections in an urban network makes it challenging for tradition...
This paper investigates application of clustering techniques in partitioning traffic flow data to congested and free flow regimes. Clustering techniques identify the similarities and dissimilarities between data, and classify the data into groups with similar characteristics. Such techniques have been successfully used in market research, astronomy...
Incentive/disincentive (I/D) clauses are designed to award payments to contractors if they complete work ahead of schedule and to deduct payments if they overrun the completion time. The use of incentive/disincentive clauses in transportation is heavily influenced by the code of federal regulations. The intended effect of this regulation is to faci...
Average speed and speed variance are two characteristics of traffic flow that affect accident rates and severity near work zones. Operationally, work zones account for approximately 24% of the non-recurring delay. A policy for work zone speed limits has to delicately balance the safety and the efficiency impacts. If speeds are set too low, then avo...
Safety improvement at nighttime work zones is important because of visibility concerns after dark. The deployment of sequential lights is an innovative method to improve driver recognition of lane closures and work zone tapers. Sequential lights are wireless warning lights that flash in a sequence to delineate clearly the taper at work zones. The e...
The 85th and 15th percentiles are two parameters that are commonly used in traffic engineering and traffic safety. For example, 85th percentile speeds are used to set speed limits and to evaluate the effectiveness of safety countermeasures, and 15th percentile speeds are used to establish typical walking speeds for traffic signal timing. But the la...
Evacuations have long been studied within disciplinary boundaries, most frequently in the social sciences and in transportation engineering. Despite the common object of study, previous works integrating these fields’ perspectives are relatively sparse, sometimes leading to evacuation planning models that are divorced from social theory or that obs...
A Fuzzy Logic-based lane changing model was developed for mandatory lane changes at lane drops. Genetic Algorithm was used for optimizing the widths of membership functions. The Next Generation Simulation (NGSIM) dataset of vehicle trajectories was used for model development and validation. The model performed better than a comparable binary Logit...
Work zone capacity is a key variable in scheduling construction activity on roadways. Understanding the effect of different definitions of capacity on the values computed from field data will result in better planning and scheduling of lane closures. Capacity values obtained using three different definitions (and methods) of capacity: (1) maximum s...
Specific service (or logo) signs provide information on attractions, camping, lodging, food, and gas services on the mainline of limited-access highways in advance of the interchange that provides access to the services. At present, to ascertain the distance to a particular establishment, motorists depart from the mainline and read the distance on...
We propose an evaluation approach for a novel travel demand management strategy known as the downtown space reservation system (DSRS). This approach takes into account three perspectives, i.e., transportation service provider’s, the user’s, and the community’s and is based on network-Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) where the perspectives are inter-...
The Highway Space Inventory Control System (HSICS) is a novel travel demand management concept in which all road users have to make reservations in advance to enter a highway. A modeling framework for such a system is proposed and illustrated for a hypothetical highway section. The proposed system allocates highway space temporally and spatially ov...
The displaced left-turn (DLT) design, also known as the continuous flow intersection, has proved to be a superior alternative to the conventional intersection in terms of handling heavy volumes during peak periods. In locations where the availability of additional right-of-way and driveway access is not a major concern, the DLT design is a costeffe...
This paper focuses on traffic modeling of large-scale hurricane evacuation networks. Several research efforts to date have addressed the evacuation problem from a local perspective. The largest network found in the open literature on microscopic simulation of evacuation operations was of an area 45 miles long and 15 miles wide. The current study mo...
This paper presents a new clustering-based methodology for sensor placements on freeways for estimating travel times. The proposed methodology is applicable to both freeways with no existing deployment and freeways with existing sensor deployments, where it identifies the critical sensors that need to be regularly maintained. The freeway sections a...
In this paper, a Travel Demand Management strategy known as the Downtown Space Reservation System (DSRS) is introduced. The purpose of this system is to facilitate the mitigation of traffic congestion in a cordon-based downtown area by requiring people who want to drive into this area to make reservations in advance. An integer programming formulat...
The purpose of this research was to develop a decision support methodology to identify the optimal locations of a finite set of point detectors on a freeway corridor to minimize the error in travel time estimation. The developed methodology, consisting of floating vehicle-based global-positioning system data collection, and use of a heuristic searc...
Traffic simulation tools are being increasingly adopted by DOTs for various traffic analysis studies, including assessing work zone traffic impacts. This is due, in part, to their ability to model individual vehicle and driver behavior at a highly detailed level to assess the traffic performance. In order to accurately use the simulation models for...
This research investigates the design and impact of a new travel demand management approach, namely the Downtown Space Reservation
System (DSRS), using a microscopic traffic simulation approach executed in VISSIM. The DSRS is part of a Travel Demand Management
strategy that is designed to mitigate traffic congestion in a downtown urban setting. The...
Evaluating the traffic impacts of work zones is vital for any transportation agency to plan and schedule work activity. Traffic impacts can be estimated by using microscopic simulation models. One challenge in using these software models is obtaining the desired work zone capacity values, which tend to vary from state to state. Thus, the default pa...
Planners, engineers and economists have introduced various demand management methods in an attempt to reduce the fast growing traffic congestion. The basic idea behind various demand management strategies is to force drivers to travel and use transportation facilities more during off-peak hours and less during peak hours, as well as to increase the...
In the 16th International symposium on transportation and traffic theory, we had presented a novel demand management concept known as the Highway Space Inventory Control System (HSICS). The basic idea of HSICS is that all road users have to make reservations in advance to enter the highway. The system allows highway operators to make real-time deci...
A real-time road pricing system in the case of a two-link parallel network is proposed in this paper. The system that is based on a combination of Dynamic Programming and Neural Networks makes “on-line” decisions about road toll values. In the first phase of the proposed model, the best road toll sequences during certain time period are calculated...
Transportation planners and traffic engineers are facing the challenge of inventing ways to mitigate congestion during the peak hours. Alleviating delays and improving safety for passengers and pedestrians are the primary motives. One way of achieving these objectives is to search for alternative intersection and interchange designs. This paper pre...
Transportation planners and traffic engineers are facing the challenge of inventing ways to mitigate congestion during the peak hours. Alleviating delays and improving safety for passengers and pedestrians are the primary motives. One way of achieving these objectives is to search for alternative intersection and interchange designs. This paper pre...
Word Count = 2549 (text) + 4000 (figures and tables) = 6549 Abstract Many intersections in the urban areas are signalized. As roundabouts are beginning to multiply, they are being considered adjacent to signalized intersections and for replacing some signalized intersections. Traffic simulation has been used to study the performance of both signali...
Citations
... Do evacuees consider how much the traffic will be improved by the strategies (or the change of travel time) in making their decisions? These questions are worthwhile additional explorations based on recent findings about the impacts of estimated travel delay on household hurricane evacuation related choices [65]. Addressing these questions could also help emergency managers tailor their information provision based on whether warningtype information or action-type information (e.g., implementing a capacity enhancing strategy) is more effective in persuading people to take protective actions. ...
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... With behavioral data, a step beyond setting up driver group percentages in traffic simulation is to have models predict route choice behavior at a disaggregate level. Chang et al. considered evacuation experience, expected travel time to the destination, and willingness to use the recommended route in modeling household interstate choice behavior [18]. The three factors all increased the likelihood for households to take interstates. ...
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... There are three classifications of event severity: crash, near-crash, and baseline. The Virginia Tech Transportation Institute (VTTI) defines the above three event severities as follows [31]. ...
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... FlexSim simulation tool was utilized to create a VR recreation in [114]. It is a 3D DES computer program which contains common and health-care-focused items [115][116]. ...
... When a work zone is detected, the smartphone vibrates to alert users, and the app then broadcasts an audible message to them (Liao 2014). Azadi et al. (2020) developed and deployed a work zone application for collecting, reporting, and storing real-time work-zone activity information. The study indicated that the precision of sensors such as GPS was within appreciable accuracy of work zone geolocation. ...
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... Both PCA and LDA are utilized for representation and dimensionality decrease yet t-SNE is explicitly utilized for perception purposes as it were. It is used as (PCA) for dimensionality reduction methods which are used to reduce the classification variables and also used to detect main critical variables [2]. ...
... According to specifications of a research topic, simulated driving scenarios are created. Some driving simulators have been designed for TMA studies [2,27,38], but not for the ATMA yet. ...
... Many studies have discussed different aspects of the work zone. For example, Bharadwaj et al. examined work zone events to identify the factors that affected crashes in work zones [9]. Hamdar et al. defined some variables that affected work zone conditions and situations [10]. ...
... These include machine learning methods such as linear regression, decision tree (DT), random forest (RF), and gradient boosting regressor (GBR). Machine learning algorithms can capture the complex and underlying relationships between various factors even when their relationships are not readily apparent [10]. Table 1 summarizes the travel time prediction studies which used modern machine learning methods, whereas Table 2 summarizes the travel time prediction studies that have been done in India. ...
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... The results revealed that after calibration the transferred SPFs between the two countries showed satisfactory performance on both model fit and hotspot identification. Claros et al. (2020) compared the performance of calibration factors, functions, and JS models in predicting the expected crash frequencies on urban four-lane freeway segments in Missouri. They developed specific safety performance functions (SPF) and used different goodness of fitness measures for comparative analysis of all model approaches. ...
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