Introduction

Office of Traffic Operations

The Iowa DOT Office of Traffic Operations ensures the mobility and safe operation of the transportation system through proactive traffic management which is also called Transportation Systems Management and Operations (TSMO). The office oversees:

Management of the day-to-day traffic operations on the highway system through the statewide Traffic Management Center (TMC)
Management of the emergency transportation operations (ETO) response efforts on behalf of the DOT
Management and maintenance of the 511 Travel Information System
Deployment and maintenance of intelligent transportation systems (ITS) on the highway system
Development and maintenance of a coordinated, comprehensive statewide traffic incident management (TIM) response plan
Management of Iowa's TSMO plan

Research and Support by Iowa State University

Beginning in 2013, the Iowa DOT initiated an annual contract with InTrans’ Center for Transportation Research and Education (CTRE) for support to the Office of Traffic Operations (OTO). The CTRE group organized a program called Real Time Analytics of Transportation Data (REACTOR) which serves as a focal point for OTO decision support and innovation.

What we do...

This work is time driven and can vary in production demands from months down to hours. This work serves as a resource across DOT towards aligned practices, procedures, data, and performance measures with other offices including the Office of Maintenance, Planning, Traffic and Safety, Design, Construction, and Location and Environment. The work tasks are presented in the following tabs arranged by "Active" projects. Each project listed includes the Objective, Current Work Activities, and Complete Work.

Who we are...

Staffing to complete the research, support, and innovation efforts for OTO is diverse (from high-school students up through post-doctoral positions). The core team includes both Professional and Scientific staff, Faculty, and a full range of students. As shown below, in FY 18, there were 27 individuals (almost all partially funded) who represent 5 major job categories:

Faculty (4)
Professional and Scientific Staff (7)
Post Doctoral (3)
Research Assistants including Masters and PhD (20)
Undergraduate Students (3)

Our collective MOMENTUM...

CTRE has been successful in leveraging these innovative and unique high performance computing activities to bring in outside funding which advances the capabilities of REACTOR to support DOT and integrates advanced multi-discipline solutions for OTO including the Traffic Operations Center. One example is the National Science Foundation grant "A Smart Service System for Traffic Incident Management Enabled by Large-data Innovations (TIMELI) ".