Visualizing real-time and archived traffic incident data

Abstract

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 to 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.

A Survey of Traffic Data Visualization

“…They cover situation-aware exploration and prediction [5], [14], [75], [91], [94], pattern discovery and clustering [9], [23], [34]- [36], [68], [92], and traffic situation monitoring [7], [11], [24], [26], [27], [93]. In this section, we present representative works, and summarize these works in Table III.…”

“…The transportation incident management explorer (TIME) is a system that combines temporal and spatial data with incident logs [93]. TIME integrates six visualizations, namely, communications, variable message signs, responders, lane status, traffic speed and traffic volumes.…”

Visual Analytics of Traffic Congestion Propagation Path with Large Scale Camera Data

“…In these researches, accident and congestion events are the two major concerns. VanDaniker et al [12] described a Traffic incident management explorer (TIME). It was an interaction system including real-time and historical accident analysis, and designed an interactive window to show the accident place and time.…”

Interactive Visual Analysis for Vehicle Detector Data

“…Experts who work in traffic management and research centers rely on VD statistic because the data provide comprehensive and systematic traffic statistics. A tool presented by VanDaniker [Van09] shows vehicle speed and flow of a small area affected by an incident. However, this simple approach is oblivious to occupancy and potentially misleads users into wrong information.…”