ITE Student Chapter Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering • University of California Irvine

CEE 198/199 ITE ANNUAL PROJECT

Fall 2006 [Course Code: 17165]
Instructor: Professor MG McNally <mmcnally_at_uci_edu>
Project Options 198/199 Units Prior Projects UCI ITE HOME

The ITE annual project is the primary activity of the UCI Student Chapter of the Institute of Transportation Engineers. A project is selected in the fall, the work continues through the winter, and a final report is written and a presentation is made to the Southern California ITE professional chapter in the spring. The project is completed by members of the ITE student chapter and by other interested students. Any participant may choose to receive academic credit by registering for CEE 198 (from 1 to 4 units, depending on proposed work tasks).

There are usually several project options available. The Chapter advisors and members select a project at the end of the Spring or in the beginning of the Fall quarter. Typically, the projects relate to undergraduate transportation courses, encompassing such topics as signal timing, travel forecasting, or evaluation of new technologies. All project tasks are completed by the Chapter, often with the cooperation of local agencies or firms.

2005-2006 Annual Project: Persistent Traffic Cookies
For the 2005/2006 Annual Project, the UCI ITE Student Chapter decided to participate in an on-going research effort associated with the Institute of Transportation Studies, Irvine. Research at ITS has led to the development of an advanced vehicle tracking and identification technology known as PTC, a real time, distributed vehicle travel history database. Vehicles have small wireless devices that can communicate to road side controllers. A short-range connection is established and a traffic cookie (location + timestamp) is written to the on-board database. Continuous tracking throughout the network generates a complete vehicle travel history. The traffic cookies remain in the database, persistent from trip to trip (thus, Persistent Traffic Cookies, or PTC).
Technical feasibility is being evaluated in the laboratory and in defined field tests. Institutional feasibility involves the acceptance of the technology by the population in general and by the traffic control community. As a first step in assessing potential acceptance, a survey has been designed and a pre-test completed. The survey queries for information on: respondents and their work commutes, respondent attitudes towards privacy issues, and alternate ways to pay for this system. The student chapter project involves the development of the survey instrument, completion of the pre-test, and subsequent fielding of the full survey. In the pre-test, 35 UCI Commuters (faculty, staff, students) were randomly surveyed at parking garages at the end of day. Initial results are provided in the presentation slides. The presentation for the 2005-2006 ITE Annual Project may be viewed at the ITE Student Chapter Web Site (select "Annual Project" from the menu).

2006-2007 Annual Project: Persistent Traffic Cookies -- Field Survey
The leading candidate for the 2006-2007 project is a continuation of last year's project. We will implement and evaluate a field survey of the PTC concept. Other options will be discussed at the first ITE meeting, to be announced in the first week of Fall quarter.

[ CEE 198 Home | Last modified: 31 August 2006 | terms of use | © mgm ]
[ EEE Home | UCI Home | CEE Home | ITS Home ]