Transportation Engineering Commons^™

An Investigation Of Water Obstructions And Related Weather Conditions For Nebraska Roadways, Mark R. Anderson, Logan R. Bundy

Nebraska Department of Transportation: Research Reports

Roadway resilience across the 10,000 miles of road and 3,500 bridges in Nebraska is critical to the economic success of productionand logistics. In a state where historical flooding scenarios, such as the one in March 2019 that caused $150 million in damage,could potentially be increasing, it has become essential to understand the spatial and temporal distribution of high-frequency waterobstruction areas on roadways. Therefore, in order to further investigate these areas, the main objectives of this research were toperform statistical and spatial analyses to quantify the relationship between water obstructions and their associated meteorologicalconditions, and identify the potential linkages between water …

Estimating System And Traveler Costs Due To Lane Closures During Construction And Maintenance Operations, Ernest Tufuor, Li Zhao, Mm Haque, Laurence Rilett Ph.D., John Anderson, Eric Thompson

Nebraska Department of Transportation: Research Reports

Lane closures are used to facilitate activities related to road construction and maintenance or operations. However, there are economic costs associated with lane closures and these may accrue to both the traveling public as well as to traffic agencies. The Nebraska Governor’s office has identified maximizing the effectiveness of lane closures as a priority for the Nebraska Department of Transportation (NDOT). The goal of this project is to assist NDOT in effectively managing the operations of work zones to maximize the effectiveness of lane closures under Nebraska conditions. This report summarizes the findings of the current state of the practice …

Estimating System And Traveler Costs Due To Lane Closures During Construction And Maintenance Operations, Ernest Tufuor, Lianlin Zhao, Mm Shakiul Haque, Laurence Rilett, John Anderson, Eric Thompson

Nebraska Department of Transportation: Research Reports

Lane closures are used to facilitate activities related to road construction and maintenance or operations. However, there are economic costs associated with lane closures and these may accrue to both the traveling public as well as to traffic agencies. The Nebraska Governor’s office has identified maximizing the effectiveness of lane closures as a priority for the Nebraska Department of Transportation (NDOT). The goal of this project is to assist NDOT in effectively managing the operations of work zones to maximize the effectiveness of lane closures under Nebraska conditions. This report summarizes the findings of the current state of the practice …

Data-Driven Framework For Understanding & Modeling Ride-Sourcing Transportation Systems, Bishoy Kelleny

Civil & Environmental Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Ride-sourcing transportation services offered by transportation network companies (TNCs) like Uber and Lyft are disrupting the transportation landscape. The growing demand on these services, along with their potential short and long-term impacts on the environment, society, and infrastructure emphasize the need to further understand the ride-sourcing system. There were no sufficient data to fully understand the system and integrate it within regional multimodal transportation frameworks. This can be attributed to commercial and competition reasons, given the technology-enabled and innovative nature of the system. Recently, in 2019, the City of Chicago the released an extensive and complete ride-sourcing trip-level data for …

Assessment Of Parameters For A Safe And Equitable Roadway Network For Pedestrians Of South Carolina, Sababa Islam

All Dissertations

In 2019, South Carolina ranked fourth in the nation in pedestrian fatalities per 100,000 population. There has been a 68% increase in total pedestrian crashes in SC from 2011 to 2018. Walking might be a choice for some individuals; however, it is mandatory for some users due to the unavailability of personal automobiles or physical disability. Thus, pedestrian crashes and resulting deaths and injuries can disproportionately affect these population segments. Nationwide pedestrian crash statistics reveal American Indian or Alaskan Native and African American populations are overburdened with pedestrian crashes. This research aims to help mitigate this overburden of pedestrian crashes …

Digitalization Of Construction Project Requirements Using Natural Language Processing (Nlp) Techniques, Fahad Ul Hassan

All Dissertations

Contract documents are a critical legal component of a construction project that specify all wishes and expectations of the owner toward the design, construction, and handover of a project. A single contract package, especially of a design-build (DB) project, comprises hundreds of documents including thousands of requirements. Precise comprehension and management of the requirements are critical to ensure that all important explicit and implicit requirements of the project scope are captured, managed, and completed. Since requirements are mainly written in a natural human language, the current manual methods impose a significant burden on practitioners to process and restructure them into …

Design Of A Freight Transportation Outreach Curriculum, Breanna Stoesz

Civil Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

This project is centered around finding a solution to the shortage of truck drivers within the freight industry. Specifically, this project aims to lessen this shortage by ensuring potential future drivers are aware of the benefits of the industry and are encouraged to consider this career path for themselves. By producing an engaging and educational freight transportation curriculum for middle and high school students to go through in outreach programs, these students would have an increased likelihood of joining the trucking profession and encourage others to become informed about the profession as well. In addition to the direct driving role, …

Determining Earthquake Impacts On Arkansas' Roadway Network: An Application Of Hazus., Simon Rothwell

Civil Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

Natural hazards are a dangerous and unpredictable aspect of life on earth. They can cause devastating damage to our surroundings that makes movement of people, goods, and emergency services difficult. There is a need to plan for these disasters to ensure that damages to our infrastructure and people are minimized. It can be difficult for planners to determine which parts of a roadway network are most vulnerable to a specific disaster and what their impact on the rest of the network may be. This thesis uses a nationally available natural disaster estimation tool developed by FEMA called “Hazus” (FEMA, 2020). …

Comparing The Stiffness Of Cold In-Place Recycled Asphalt Pavement To Hot Mix Asphalt: Determining The Reproducibility Of The Stiffness Rebound Test, Tanner Turben

Civil Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

The Stiffness Raveling Mechanism Test (SRMT) was originally developed as an indirect measure of pavement stiffness to determine a pavement’s tendency to ravel, a type of damage. Regarding rehabilitation of existing roadways by Full Depth Reclamation (FDR) Cold In-Place Recycling (CIR), concern of field repeatability was expressed (Hill & Braham, 2016).

An analysis of lab-compacted samples of CIR and Hot Mix Asphalt (HMA) was performed to determine if the results could be reproduced between CIR and HMA. Additionally, the experiment observed the effects of percent air voids, temperature, and moisture conditioning on CIR and HMA. Three samples were prepared for …

Community Transportation Needs And Willingness To Use Shared Micromobility: A Case Study Of Fort Smith, Arkansas, Anthony Michael Kammerer

Civil Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

Shared micromobility is utilized in “targeted service areas with the usage generally intended for short trips such as "first- and last-mile" connections to complete trips made via other modes, including transit” (Price et al., 2021). In the United States, this practice has especially taken off with the implementation of sharing-based systems. This is evidenced by ridership numbers in the United States growing from 84 million riders nationwide in 2018 to 136 million riders in 2019 (NACTO, 2020). Users often use their smart phone or another similar device to unlock the vehicle after paying a fee on the device through their …

Using Safety Performance Models, Autonomous Vehicle Data, And Machine Learning To Develop Contextual Complexity Criteria To Establish A Standardized Process For On-Road Evaluation Of Medically At-Risk Drivers Considering Static And Dynamic Factors Of The Roadway Environment, Vijay Bendigeri

All Dissertations

The field of transportation engineering has an opportunity to positively impact the medical community, specifically the clinicians who evaluate, train, and rehabilitate at-risk drivers. Driving Rehabilitation Specialists (DRSs) have an essential role in making roads safer for medically-at-risk drivers, their passengers, and other road users. DRSs conduct on-road driving evaluations, which are considered the gold standard to make fitness-to-drive decisions due to their high face validity. Most DRSs use a fixed route, meaning the exact same route is used to evaluate each client. When a DRS develops a fixed route, that clinician identifies characteristics of the roadway they think are …

Protecting Our Community From The Hidden Vulnerabilities Of Today’S Intelligent Transportation Systems, Shahab Tayeb

Mineta Transportation Institute

The ever-evolving technology interwoven into the transportation industry leaves it frequently at risk for cyber-attacks. This study analyzes the security of a common in-vehicle network, the Controller Area Network (CAN), standard in most vehicles being manufactured today. Like many other networks, CAN comes with inherent vulnerabilities that leave CAN implementations at risk of being targeted by cybercriminals. Such vulnerabilities range from eavesdropping, where the attacker can read the raw data traversing the vehicle, to spoofing, where the attacker can place fabricated traffic on the network. The research team initially performed a simulation of CAN traffic generation followed by hardware implementation …

Investigating The Resilience Of Accessibility To Emergency And Lifesaving Facilities Under Natural Hazards, Chih-Hao Wang, Na Chen

Mineta Transportation Institute

Studying accessibility, including the resilience of city transportation networks, is critical to understand how these networks influence individuals’ mobility and lives. This study developed an analytical research framework to examine the resilience of accessibility to emergency and lifesaving facilities under the threats of natural hazards such as earthquakes and wildfires. With a cumulative-opportunity approach, the authors measured accessibility by counting emergency and lifesaving facilities (including parks, schools, hospitals, roads, and fire stations) that can be reached by driving at the census tract level in San Fernando Valley, CA. With the calculated accessibility, the authors run simulations to collect data showing …

Analyzing Vulnerabilities In The Northwest Arkansas Highway Network Using Mathematical Optimization, Brandon Jerome

Industrial Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

The highway and bridge network is a critical infrastructure that allows for the free transportation of citizens and enables truck-borne freight transportation. Disruption of this system could be caused by a terrorist attack, natural disaster, growth of population, required repairs and upgrades, or collapse caused by old age or malfunction. In the event of a disruption cities and regions can experience increased traffic and supply chain shortages, thus causing cascading effects throughout surrounding areas. With this motivation, we develop a network interdiction optimization model to identify a limited subset of roads that, if disrupted, causes the greatest increase in the …

A Case Study Of Protecting Bridges Against Overheight Vehicles, Aly Mousaad Aly, Marc Hoffmann

Faculty Publications

Most transportation departments have recognized and developed procedures to address the ever-increasing weights of trucks traveling on bridges in service today. Transportation agencies also recognize the issues with overheight vehicles’ collisions with bridges, but few stakeholders have definitive countermeasures. Bridges are becoming more vulnerable to collisions from overheight vehicles. The exact response under lateral impact force is difficult to predict. In this paper, nonlinear impact analysis shows that the degree of deformation recorded through the modeling of the unprotected vehicle-girder model provides realistic results compared to the observation from the US-61 bridge overheight vehicle impact. The predicted displacements are 0.229 …

Robust Multi-Period Maximum Coverage Drone Facility Location Problem Considering Coverage Reliability, Darshan Rajesh Chauhan, Avinash Unnikrishnan, Miguel A. Figliozzi, Stephen D. Boyles

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

This study proposes a multi-period facility location formulation to maximize coverage while meeting a coverage reliability constraint. The coverage reliability constraint is a chance constraint limiting the probability of failure to maintain the desired service standard, commonly followed by emergency medical services and fire departments. Further, uncertainties in the failure probabilities are incorporated by utilizing robust optimization using polyhedral uncertainty sets, which results in a compact mixed-integer linear program. A case study in the Portland, OR metropolitan area is analyzed for employing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or drones to deliver defibrillators in the region to combat out-of-hospital cardiac arrests. In …

Fight For Flight: The Narratives Of Human Versus Machine Following Two Aviation Tragedies, Andrew Prahl, Rio Kin Ho Leung, Alicia Ning Shan Chua

Human-Machine Communication

This study provides insight into the relationship between human and machine in the professional aviation community following the 737 MAX accidents. Content analysis was conducted on a discussion forum for professional pilots to identify the major topics emerging in discussion of the accidents. A subsequent narrative analysis reveals dominant arguments of human versus machine as zero-sum, surrender to machines, and an epidemic of mistrust. Results are discussed in the context of current issues in human-machine communication, and we discuss what other quickly automating industries can learn from aviation’s experience.

A New Generation Of Open-Graded Friction Course For Enhanced Durability And Functionality, Hossam Abohamer

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This study aims at (1) enhancing Open Graded Friction Course (OGFC) mixes durability using additives and other by-products; (2) investigating the impacts of selected factors on OGFC pavements seepage characteristics; (3) developing a quantitative tool to model the deterioration in OGFC pavements functional performance; and (4) developing new guidelines of Air Void (AV) content for OGFC for optimum functionality and durability. For the durability objective, eight mixes were prepared with a PG 76-22 binder and two sources of aggregate (i.e., # 78 limestone and # 67 sandstone). Three Warm Mix Additives (WMA), one by-product (i.e., crumb rubber [CR]), and two …

Evaluation Of Manual Infrared Brake Screening Technologies, Joseph Crabtree, Brian Beaven, Jennifer Walton

Kentucky Transportation Center Research Report

The purpose of this project was to install and operate two manual infrared (IR) brake screening systems at Kentucky inspection facilities to enhance the quality of Level 1 safety inspections. A radio button in the inspection software allowed enforcement personnel to indicate when the IR equipment was used to select a truck for inspection. This feature allowed a direct comparison of performance measures (e.g., number of violations identified per inspection, out-of-service rate, etc.) for IR-generated inspections versus all inspections.

The evaluation focused on inspections at the Lyon County site for a 60-day period during September and October 2021. Analysis of …

Effects Of Emergency Vehicle Warning Lighting System Characteristics On Driver Perception And Behavior, Emily Hiebner

Doctoral Dissertations and Master's Theses

Secondary crashes, including struck-by incidents are a leading cause of line-of-duty deaths among emergency responders, such as firefighters, law enforcement officers, and emergency medical service providers. The introduction of light emitting diode (LED) sources and advanced lighting control systems, provides a wide range of options for emergency lighting configurations. This study investigated the impact of lighting color, intensity, modulation, and flash rate on driver behavior while traversing a traffic incident scene at night. The impact of retroreflective chevron markings in combination with lighting configurations, as well as the measurement of “moth-to-flame” effects of emergency lighting on drivers was also investigated. …