Pre-Deployment Study for the Connecting the East Orlando Communities Project

PI (Co-PI): Mohamed Abdel-Aty, Samiul Hasan

Funded by FDOT District 5

Central Florida’s Connecting the East Orlando Communities (CEOC) project received an $11.9 million grant from the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) to advance several Transportation Systems Management and Operations (TSM&O) technologies that aim to improve safety and mitigating congestion. Combining the grant from FHWA and local investments, CEOC is a $65 million project comprised of three interrelated programs including PedSafe, GreenWay, and SmartCommunity, which will connect through an ongoing FDOT initiative, SunStore.  PedSafe is an innovative pedestrian and bicycle collision avoidance system that uses connected vehicle (CV) technologies to reduce the occurrence of pedestrian and bicycle crashes at locations with high crash risk. GreenWay is designed to reduce congestion and increase reliability by actively managing traffic signals in the East Orlando area. SmartCommunity is an integrated program that aims at connecting communities by connecting people to the places they need to go and the services they need to get. In this project, a team of experts from the Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT), MetroPlan Orlando, and the University of Central Florida (UCF) will test several technologies to achieve the above-mentioned programs. The UCF plays a central role by bringing its research capabilities and existing Smart Cities initiative to advance the objectives of the proposed programs. Also, the UCF research team will lead the transportation system performance investigation through big data collection and analysis. The CEOC project is committed to an evaluation program that quantifies the safety and mobility benefits of technology deployment through before-and-after studies. It is expected that the CEOC project will bring tremendous changes in the study area and it is necessary to archive the traffic data before the changes occur. Hence, we propose to work with the FDOT to conduct a comprehensive evaluation study to analyze the performance of the current transportation system before the deployment of the technologies. This could help better understand the current transportation system and quantify the benefits that could be obtained from the proposed technology deployments. In addition, it is expected that strategies will be suggested to optimize the deployment based on the evaluation results.

The primary goal of the evaluation project is to conduct a comprehensive evaluation study before the deployment of the advanced technologies, strategies, and applications suggested in the project, “Connecting the East Orlando Communities”. Basically, the project will achieve the following objectives:

  • Archive detailed data for the current transportation system before the technology deployments
  • Evaluate the performance of the current transportation system considering traffic efficiency and traffic safety impacts

Overview of the Performance Measurements Framework