On November 15 and 16, 2017, the Wyoming Department of Transportation (WYDOT) successfully demonstrated to the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) and the media how messages from connected vehicles can be received by Wyoming’s Traffic Management Center (TMC) in Cheyenne and integrated into its traffic management and information dissemination activities.
WYDOT has adapted the code for the USDOT’s Operational Data Environment (ODE), originally written to collect data from a connected vehicle testbed in Detroit, to process and distribute messages received from connected vehicles in the Wyoming CV Pilot program. The Basic Safety Messages transmitted by equipped cars and trucks contain vehicle location, heading, acceleration, and other vehicle status data, and are transmitted using Abstract Syntax Notation (ASN.1) to minimize radio bandwidth for the messages. WYDOT’s ODE contains an open source decoder for ASN.1, expanding the messages into easily-readable JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) used by the Wyoming TMC and many other TMCs.
Road weather and road condition information collected by the Wyoming CV System is ingested into and processed by the Pikalert system for dissemination to the public.
The WYDOT Data Broker manages the exchange of information among the data sources, including vehicle data from the ODE, weather data from the Pikalert system, incident information from the Incident Console (IC), work zone data from the Construction Administrator, and parking information from the 511 application. This exchange of information enables the operation of connected vehicle applications such as generation of road weather alerts and advisories and determination of variable speed limits. The Data Broker also sends data to WYDOT’s Data Warehouse.
The Data Broker also sends weather and road condition data and incident data to the Wyoming Traveler Information (WTI) interface. The WTI system has the integrated logic to automatically update the state’s 511 systems (website, 511, 511 App, text and email alerts) in near real time.
The same information will be shared with fleet management centers via the Commercial Vehicle Operator Portal (CVOP) system, which provides freight-specific information to subscribed fleet partners (who will then communicate it to their trucks using their own communication systems). Currently, more than 800 firms subscribe to CVOP.
The ODE also sends the data to the USDOT Situation Data Warehouse (SDW), to the Connected Vehicle Program Evaluation Platform (CVPEP) to enable analysis by the CV Pilot program evaluators, Texas Transportation Institute (TTI) and Volpe National Lab, and to the USDOT’s ITS DataHub that will be accessible by all researchers.
Before any data is sent to the ITS DataHub for public dissemination, however, the data is scrubbed to remove any Personally Identifiable Information (PII). This privacy module was developed in coordination with Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which has been supporting USDOT in this area for several years. The ODE examines the incoming data and removes:
The Data Broker sends to the ODE Traveler Information Messages (TIMs) for ASN.1 encoding for transmission to connected vehicles from Roadside Units (RSUs). These information messages include weather warnings and advisories, recommended speeds, and parking/services information for trucks.
According to the WYDOT system integrator, the ODE software “makes connected vehicle complexities disappear” by facilitating data transfer among the major components of the CV Pilot deployment. It runs on an Ubuntu (Linux) server at the WYDOT TMC. Since it is open source, written in C++ and Java, it can be used and/or adapted by other localities for their deployment of connected vehicle operations. The code can be found on the USDOT CV Pilot Git repository https://github.com/usdot-jpo-ode/jpo-ode.
