Hello, welcome to the talking operations web conference on work zone traffic analysis strategy. I am Jennifer Symoun, I will give a brief very pleased to have pleased be advised today's seminar is being recorded, will last hour and 50 minutes. During the presentation, if you think of a question, you can type into the smaller text box in the chat area on the lower left of your screen. Indicate who your question is intended for unless it's for all presenters. Presenters will be unable to answer during presentation, but we will use questions from the chat box for the Question and Answer session and the last 30 minutes of the seminar. There may be a few a file containing the audio and video will be posted on the website within the next week. I will type an address into the chat box shortly. We encourage you to share where with others who may not have been able to attend. There are directions above the box on how to download the file. Attendees will be notified of the availability of the PowerPoints in the next day or so. At this time I would like to introduce Daniel Gray, the moderator of today's webcast. If the Federal Highway Administration since 1987, transportation engineer, resource center in Atlanta, specializing in work zones. Traffic engineer for the state of Maryland, current duties including work operation, safety, ITS advancements. Involve engineering degree from SC state university, and masters from Morgan State University. Daniel. I am Daniel member of the Federal Highway Resource Center, member of the operations technical service team, and would like to welcome you to today's Webinar for work zone traffic analysis strategies. Here is an overview, first topic, we will look at perspectives on work zone analysis strategies, followed by the decisionmaking process and work zone traffic analysis, finally the issues on work zone traffic analysis, conclusions and will begin our Q&A session. First topic, perspectives on work zone traffic analyze strategies. To give everyone some background of how we got here, this effort started probably back in the fall of ' 06, the rule was about a year from taking effect, the federal highway developed the survey to determine the uses of quicksol as we were developing the survey, moved towards what are folks using, period, if at all. We got the results back from the survey, it became obvious that industrywide there was a need or desire to have some type of guidance to help folks select the appropriate tool or class of tools for a given work zone situation, given zones vary physically, as well as behind the scenes, institutionally. At that point federal highway took the initiative to begin the research project, partnered with Nob less, formerly known as Pied Owe Tech. The purpose is to provide guidance on the use of application, transportation modeling tools so folks will better understand the impacts of work zone [indiscernible]. As we go through the discussion it will help us understand the safety impacts as well, but it's important that we realize the focus for this particular effort is for work zone mobility. About a year ago we partnered with Nabliss, formed a panel to help us develop a panel, within federal highway and folks in the field on a state level. Those folks on line today, I would like to extend a thank you for your diligent and faithful work getting the comments in, your input was very valuable, still is as we move forward. As we got that input back from the field it became obvious this particular effort should be broken into two parts and became evident it should be a part of the traffic analysis tool box in place within federal highway. These, the efforts, two parts that came out of it will be follow on volumes of the technical analysis tool box as volumes eight and nine. The first is a guidance for decisionmakers, basically a high level document that will show the decision makers, those responsible for the uses of analytical tools from the beginning, it will show the benefits of having analysis tools as part of the process in order to analyze work zone impacts. Volume nine is more towards the analysts, the title is guide for analysts. The audience are those folks who will be rolling up their sleeves, doing the analysis themselves. They will be responsible for running the program, generating the results that will help you decision makers make the informed decisions they are responsible for. As part of volume 9, you can probably imagine, case studies will be a critical component. We have broken those components up into two categories, the project applications part, as well as the strategic modeling approaches. The project application part looks at those road way construction projects across the country that used modeling tools as a part of overall decision making process. The strategic, where we look at ekes agencies that have set up technologies, instances where work zone modeling is needed and to what extent. As far as case studies, this is a list of the projects we will be investigating. It ranges from mega urban project, Woodrow Wilson bridge to rural projects within the national park system. Case studies that take a look at the strategic modeling approach, three are listed here, New Jersey turnpike authority, a lane closure application, state of Wisconsin, transportation management plan development process; and finally the state of Michigan, D.O.T.'s South eastern Michigan simulation network or Samson. This map depicts where the projects are located across the country. Topic 2, decision making process, work zone traffic analysis. At this point I will turn it over to our partner, Nobless, represented by Dr. Carl Wunderlick, a corporate fellow for transportation analysis at Nobless, and serves as a research, model, and surface transportation systems. In addition, serves as senior advise to federal highway on the traffic simulation effort, corridor management initiative, and the open source development program. Dr. Wunderlick holds a PhD in research operation from the University of Michigan. Thank you very much, Dan, hello to everybody online. Thank you for taking time out in the middle of the day to go through some of this material. Dan did a nice job taking a look at the reasons why we got started in this program. Another interesting thread to what he's talking about, we learned a lot along the way, tried to provide materials, showing what we learned along the way, key messages Dan showed at the beginning have been reinforced the more we worked on this. I think in many cases folks have been looking at this program, expecting the Federal Highway Administration might come out with guidance that include thou shalt use one specific tool. I heard that from several people I talked to about this project. I think that wasn't a very good idea to begin with, to tell you the truth, as a starting point. The more that Dan and other folks on our federal task force and us have learned, the more we reinforce the message that works on such a broad, difficult set of modeling constraints to take care of, that one particular tool really isn't the way to go. It really becomes more a process of identifying what is it you need to model, what support, then try and fashion a modeling approach that best fits that. That, in a nutshell is part of where we have come in our process of working on this. In topic two and three here, maybe more in depth graphics, things we used to try to convey that basic message. I will move on here, if I can. One graphic we use to talk about work zones, we have come to understand the use of tools really is in support of decisions about work zones. Work zones are complicated creatures to begin with because so many decisions have to be made before you get to the construction. So we have broken those kinds of decisions down, essentially into three basic categories. One is the application, the basic approach the construction will be deploying. Design/build, concrete, precast, the structure or basic approach taken. Then, related to that, the top there, the S is the scheduling. This component is when will the work occur? Clearly those things are related to whatever application you are applying. The third element of our circle is the TMP, transportation management plan. This is how we will manage traffic while construction is taking place or accommodating it or informing the public. So there are key decisions to be made in each area, but since they are connected, you can see those arrows, double ended, connect the three circles, showing no single decision in any area is made without impact on the other elements. If there's an application that needs to be done at night, the scheduling reflects that and the traffic management plan. It goes all the way around. Decisions you make in one area will always have ripple effect in the other areas as well. Another graphical element we have used here to make a point, if you can see inside the circle that contains the three blobs, a small curved area, the momentum or amount of decisionmaking you have been locked into. It's easy to make decisions in a vacuum, sometimes without having all the information at hand. Once you make a decision sometimes it's difficult to uh undo the decision later. As the decision moves forward with the project, it's difficult to move against that, dial back the clock, undo something, decision made early on. The last element here, all the decisions are not finalized in detail at the same level at the same time. The little smaller circles next to the application A, shows almost filled in, level of maturity or detail in terms of thinking about that. For this particular sample project being shown here, we may have made a fair number of decisions about application, maybe half way done, making details set for scheduling. Still have some flexibility in transportation management capability moving forward. Those are graphical elements we will use to talking about issues as far as the work zone planning process. So again, another difficult thing about work zones is that it's not a static process. The project itself moves through a project lifecycle, and the requirement, kinds of decisions you have to make, each phase of the project lifecycle is different, and you can't, maybe not done by the same people, different parts of the same agency, different agencies. In any case, the point is the decisions you make at the top level impact what happens later on in the lifecycle. So, the diagram worth showing here on the lefthand side, the program delivery process, that's a graphic that's taken out of some previous material the FHWA has produced the work zone reference document if you are not familiar, it's an excellent document to download. It's broader than modeling, adding on to the work done with that, document. For modeling, though, that complexity can be boiled down to three basic stages, the planning, design and construction. A lot of the types of decisions encountered supported by modeling were similar, what we are using on the lefthand side. These are the lifecycle stages we are dealing with, trying to understand in terms of the overall picture of getting work zones right. So what I will do now is move forward on the slides, talk a little more about the lifecycle aspect of planning. You have projects that start in this planning phase, have to start making decisions about what's going to happen all the way through the process. Sometimes the data, information institutional issues are different in that stage than later on. Whatever decisions issue made, and here's animation showing momentum going forward, whatever decisions are being made are followed to the next phases. In some cases we identified, studies encountered, there may have been a general feeling among folks in the beginning of the project about how it might go. They may have a general vision, and those elements may remain all the way through the process, whether or not the situation really has changed, and sometimes it's very difficult to go back, reexamine things and develop a new plan based on that, just because certain types of approaches or asking, traffic management types of planning are essentially ruled out early on. So, when you try to make those decisions, given that it is critical to make them as flexible, as accurate as possible, there's a rule for analysis, modeling to support the decision, so they are the most accurate, here's a decision where it moves forward, gets bigger, moves forward, all those elements get a little bit bigger. Okay. Now I will talk about each of the phases in a little more detail. Here we are in the planning phase, the application, traffic management circles have been less distinct, that's because in these phases it's like what I was talking about before, people getting a general feel for how to approach a project. May be a large project, small, single season, multiseason, in any case, whatever happens, there's some element of planning that goes on where all options are essentially on the table. These initial assumptions may emerge based on how work should be done, whether it should have certain aspects, contractor should follow standard format or different format. At this point, in order to get one's arms around the problem there has to be a connection made between application and scheduling, basically what is the kind of work and can we do that safely with some limited impact. This level, very high level, not a lot of detail for the traffic management, but it still may be important to take a look broadly at many scenarios while things are still quite flexible and many changes can be made. An example of this we found in our search of interesting case studies was a piece of analysis done for the national park system where there were many types of concerns, constraints about the road going into Glacier National Park. They had planned a several year rehabilitation for that roadway. There was concern in the community, even in the planning stage, about the impact on tourism in the area. So there was a desire, without doing specifically a lot of detailed plan, to use a sketch planning tool to identify how much work could be done on this long road with multiple interacting flagger operations to see how much that might delay or impede tourists. Then they had to talk with their local stakeholders about what they thought was a reasonable limit for that throughout the construction phase. So although in this case a lot of the planning was done in the end based on financial constraints, it helped them shape their ideas about roughly how many work zones of what various sizes could be strung together in a short construction season to get it done in a number of years. It was a useful planning exercise just to shape the conversation with the community, also with the folks planning the work. What was feasible. Next phase is PE and design, put together for purposes of work zones. Now we are out of planning, really the scheduling, application, those connections become stronger. You can't get through these phases without knowing what you are building, how and when you plan to build it. The details of the traffic management plan may still be to some degree flexible, also constrained by what's being limitations imposed in terms of schedules, 24hour closure, full, only certain times, maintenance of traffic part of the deal continued throughout the construction phase. These constraints filter down, what the smaller arrows show, into the traffic management plan. Sometimes those constraints are very reasonable, other times they may or may not make sense in terms of the overall project. Before one gets locked in to an approach here, it's useful to have considered, in some cases quantitatively assessed, through modeling and simulation, whether that constraint is a reasonable one or not. Traffic control becomes more important, will be important when vehicles are actually delayed or rerouted. Our example here in Detroit, they preferred an approach that was a full closure. Hadn't done a lot of analysis to support it would be safer, more cost effective, it was unclear whether the surrounding freeway arterial grid would support full closure. Again, they stakeholders, what the impact might be. In this case the analysis done showed the surface streets and adjacent freeways could actually handle the flow pretty well, and in fact they went ahead and did it. It was like a check on the process to identify whether or not where they were leading was going to be a reasonable solution or not; which I think was a useful analysis to do at this stage. When you get to construction, there's not a lot of flexibility. You have to know what you are building, set, contracts. People are out there doing exactly what's been set. There may be some limited flexibility in terms of schedule, that may build into the contract, or may not. Finally, there's the traffic management plan, but in this case they have really been developed, but generally, depending on how you write the contract, many agencies are leaving themselves more and more flexibility in terms of traffic management, control plan, in the construction phase to be more flexible, react to situations that may not have been clearly anticipated in previous phases. The example we are using here is for the big project, Woodrow Wilson bridge here in the Washington metropolitan area, multiyear, very complicated project, with significant traffic impacts, both locally and regionally. In the construction phase they required a tool to do quick response to identify could they approve rapidly changes to the traffic control plan in order to continue to keep the whole project on schedule. That became a very important thing. One example I am most familiar with, they needed to do night work, planned to block out an amount of time, six hours, the contractor arrived, said to do that, because of various things with the geometry, getting things on the bridge, set up, tear down, only getting an hour of work done every evening, delaying the entire schedule. That became a significant concern right away. They were able to use had good data, sketch planning tool, to estimate the delays if they had given, extended the time to ay 10hour block. As expected, there were delays incurred, but they knew what they would be, felt it was appropriate, within the bounds of agreements made with the local agencies, jurisdictions about what the delays might look like, overnight hours. They rapidly, within a day were able to around, approve the plan, in the end that particular glitch didn't cost them in any way. There were additional delays incurred, measured to make sure the data and the tools together were giving accurate predictions, were able to meet agreements made with the local jurisdictions, but the flexible they had to react to events in the construction phase that didn't go exactly as planned. Another good role for modeling. This slide on the impact of decisions sums up to some degree a lot of what we are talking about in terms of lifecycle issues, as well as where tools can be applied. Again, as we move planning through design, to construction, you have this evolution of where there are opportunities potentially to impact how the, what the decisions are going to be made, be approached, scheduled, how traffic will be controlled. You can see in the bottom third of the screen essentially, we have the modeling opportunities, diminishing, essentially, as you move forward. That means that modeling opportunities here to support, specific decisions about what's happening in the overall project works in planning. The data requirements go up because in the final stages you are not going to say, gee, we are going to stop, do it a different way, not possible. You are looking at differentiating between alternatives or options that are essentially different flavors of the same basic plan. To see what those impacts are you need a fair amount of detailed data to discriminate between two, three, four, relatively similar kinds of plans. For example, how you manage detour routes. Back up at the many opportunities for impact, broad range of high level requirements, the data sets to do that are generally lower. One of the key messages of this chart, this whole topic is an understanding that getting some kind of effort involved early, early in the process, can pay off benefits all the way through to construction. Topic three, again, that all sounds great. We should apply models, have excellent data, do a great job, flexibility, safety will be highly improved. However, when it's easy to talk about at the high level than it is to deploy on an every day case basis. In this we will talk about more practical ways of thinking about the issues of work zone traffic analysis and trying to think about how the characteristics of the work that's going to be done leads into finding an appropriate role for work zone analysis and specific types of work zone analysis tools. Here are five key factors we have identified that take a look at the for trying to figure out what kind of tool to use in what regard. I will reiterate what Dan and this is not supposed to be a search for the one super tool that handles everything, but specifically to identify the best tool that does the best job of supporting the decision you are looking at, at the moment, and expect the decisions down the pike as the work zone project moves through its project lifecycle. So work zone characteristics is our first bullet, this is a set of factors taken from the work zone self-assessment guide. I will show you that in a minute. There's the traffic management plan, issue of data quality, availability, this is a key thing that, I think folks generally nod their head, agree with, but sometimes it gets lost in the rush to model or do something. Really, the decision to go ahead and do some kind of modeling and analysis will only be as valid, valuable as the data available to support that tool itself. So out of the box, a piece of software, or a particular kind of analysis technique really doesn't have value unless it has the appropriate data to support it. That's a classic garbage in/garbage out kinds of argument. If you are going to a tool, who will be using it? Does it require a lot of care and feeding? A team of experts? Or is it something relatively simple. Talking about performances, what are the key performance measurements for your particular issue. Surprising to us, the range of key performance measures we run into. We expected to see things like delay show up a lot, maximum cube length, those kinds of things, but they did show up frequently. Oftentimes there are specific types of performance measures that are very important to one or two projects or one or two people stakeholders, and if you can't measure those, you need on because that's what will be asked about. The work zone characteristics, Type I through five, taken from the self-assessment guide out there; the big ones, effect the largest number of people, one, the user impacts, long duration. Two and three are different flavors of Type I, but maybe the impacts are a little less. Finally type four, little ones with short duration, low visibility. It's important to consider work zones do come in all these different types, it's a legitimate way to begin to think about what are your approaches for various many times, people think about, drive n to the largest, most complex, it's natural, not unwarranted, however it's sometimes self-limiting, because there are some things that can be done to really organize and improve these two, three and four type work zones, sometimes a little forgotten, not the highest visible ones, don't get a lot of visible, it can be surprising the type of impact they have. The case study, a little analysis can go a long way in improving mobility for these types of work zones. That's the type of work zone, a way to think about it, another is the configuration. There really are different types of tools that are better suited for different types of geometry and the impacted area for a work zone. One, again, is the easiest to think about, the isolated, off by itself, little interaction, self-contained, generates some delay, but really restricted to the area adjacent. Like the Glacier is a good example of the pipe.