The Wyoming Department of Transportation (WYDOT) has successfully demonstrated to the US Department of Transportation (USDOT) how messages from connected vehicles (CVs) can be received by the state’s traffic management center (TMC) in Cheyenne, and integrated into its traffic management and information dissemination systems.
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, Michigan, to process and distribute messages received from CVs in the Wyoming Connected Vehicle Pilot. 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 CV 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, road condition and incident data to the Wyoming Traveler Information (WTI) interface, which 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 more than 800 currently subscribed partners, who will then transmit it to trucks using their own communication systems.
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 team, Texas Transportation Institute (TTI) and Volpe National Lab; and to the USDOT’s ITS Public Data Hub (PDH) that will be accessible by all researchers.
Before any data is sent to the PDH for widespread dissemination, it is scrubbed to remove any personally identifiable information (PII) using a privacy module developed in coordination with Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
