Well, welcome and thank you for standing by. At this time all participants are in a listen only mode. During the question and answer session please press star 1 on your touch tone phone to ask a question. Now I'd like to turn the meeting over to Ms. Jennifer Symoun. Thank you, hello, everybody and welcome to the talking Operations web conference. I'm going to be giving you a brief introduction to the web conferencing environment before turning the session over to Eddie Curtis who we're very pleased to have as our moderator today for talking Operations seminar. Please be advised today's seminar is being recorded. Today's seminar will last approximately an hour had and 45 minutes with 70 minutes allocated for the presenters and final 30 minutes for audience question and answer. During the presentation if you think of a question you can type it moo the smaller text box underneath in the chat area , on the left side of your screen. Please indicate who your question is directed towards, unless your question is intended for all presenters and please make sure you're typing in the thin text box and not the large white area. Please also make sure you send your question to everybody. Presenters will not be able to answer your questions during their presentations but Eddie will use the questions typed moo the chat box for the question and answer session in the last 30 minutes of the seminar. A file containing the audio and visual portion of the seminar will be posted to the national transportation Operations coalitions website within the next week. I will type that address ma the chat box shortly. We encourage you to direct others in your office who may have not been able to attend the seminar to access the recording. The PowerPoint presentations used during the seminar will also be available on the website. However, you can can also download the presentations right now from the box in the lower left corner of your screen and there are instructions above that on how to download the presentations and you can save them directly to your computer. I'd now like to introduce Eddie Curtis, the moderator of Today's Webcast. Eddie is the Manager of the arterial Management and traffic signaling timing program within the federal highway administration Office of Operations and is also a member of the federal highway administration Resource center Operations technical service team. He is the pray merry contact for the deployment within the federal highway administration and has conducted several workshops throughout the nation to promote adaptive control technology and specifically ACSLight. He served as project Manager for the 2007 traffic signal report card and is managing the development of the signal timing manual due out in May and several research projects focused on improving traffic signal Operations. He joins federal highway administration in February of 2006 and previously worked for the City of Los Angeles and traffic Operations and research. He is a registered professional engineer in California and Louisiana. So now, I'll turn things over to Eddie to start off Today's seminar. Eddie, I'll bring up your presentation and you can begin when you're ready. Okay, thank you, Jennifer. I'd like to welcome everybody to the ACS Light Webcast today. We have three great speakers lined up that I think are going to give you some very comprehensive information about ACS Light, and I encourage you to type questions into the chat box, should you have any and certainly, take our contact information down and definitely give us any questions additional information you'd like to obtain about ACS Light. I'm going to start off today and introduce all three of the speakers, and as Jennifer said I am the first speaker actually. And I'll go through their bios and then move into my presentation which will pretty much give you on overview of traffic signal Operations and how adaptive systems fit into traditional Operations, per se. And then we'll have Dr. Shelby go into development and the functionality of ACS Light, and Kirk Houserer will kind of sum everything up and give an overview of his experience with ACS Light. Tyler, Texas was the first agency to fall on the sword I guess and decide to deploy ACS Light which is up until recently was really just a research project, so we're really happy that Tyler, Texas was able to take that leap and get us going. Okay, so let's look on our, I'll go over the biographies of our two other speakers. After me will be Dr. Steve Shelby. Dr. Shelby is a research project Managers with Siemens working out of Tucson, Arizona. He's a leading expert in the design and development of adaptive traffic signal control systems. He is essentially a designer and sole software development for ACS Light. In the prior days of the University of Arizona he helped develop the road of adaptive system which is funded by the federal highway administration and he's also worked on a lot of other projects including transit priority systems in Salt Lake City in Houston and developing communication software for advanced traffic Management systems, deployed nationwide and he's also doing research on surrogate measures for intersection safety. Kirk Houserer, our third speaker is a graduate of Texas A & M University and he has 20 years of experience in public works 10 of which has been spent in traffic and transportation. He is the city traffic engineer for the City of Tyler, Texas and he's current Board member for the Texas chapter of ITE. Mr. Houseer is married with two kids, his son is studying electrical engineering at Rice University and his daughter was just accepted into the Texas Academy of Math and Science. Sounds like she's a a future engineer. Okay I'm going to start off my presentation and when you start talking about improving the technology of traffic signal systems, I think you first have to ask a couple of questions. What are the objectives and the purpose of traffic signals? If you're going to improve the technology, how will you help these signals achieve their purpose? And I think the purpose of traffic signals can be polarized into these four statements and these actually came out of a document that was put together by the federal highway administration Office of safety, and these are pretty consistent of w what you'll see in the MUTCD in terms of warrants. I think of particular interest to me is the last one, and that's to maximize the capacity of each intersection approach and then probably the second one too, minimizing vehicles and pedestrians, I think these are two purposes that adaptive systems can help achieve, and since we ask that question, what's the purpose of traffic signals and what are the objectives, you have to consider how are we achieving these objectives today. If we were to use the traffic signal report card as a barometer for that we probably would conclude that we're not doing that great with an overall score of a " D" in 2007 which is up slightly from a D- in thousand 5. In the realm of adaptive systems, I would say that we probably could help improve two areas of the signal report card and I would say that those would be the Management of our signal systems overall and because when you deploy an adaptive system, you basically have to move or you're committing to move from a reactive posture to more of a pro active posture, and then what goes along with that is the section on traffic monitoring and data collection, which was Section 5, and by deploying an adaptive system or an advanced signal system of almost any type, it gives you the ability to collect a higher resolution of data and to monitor and interact with the system. So, in all of these areas, Management, we certainly had a D-and in traffic monitoring and data collection, overall, respondents to the survey scored themselves an F, so these are definitely two areas where we can apply some effort to make improvements. When you ask the question, well what agencies are having the greatest difficulty? Who is producing the scores that we're seeing? And primarily, we found that agencies that have 50 or fewer traffic signals tend to struggle the most in terms of operating and maintaining their traffic signal systems. And in respect with ACS Light, the system designed and we found that there's some 20,000 close up systems deployed throughout the United States, and a large portion of those systems are deployed in municipalities that have 50 or fewer traffic signals so it's an optimal technology for a small agency but you can see that the scores actually the group that did the best was the agencies with 450-1,000 signals and we saw that's a combination of having the right balance of resources in terms of your engineering expertise in house and the size of the system. The systems tend not to be too large, when you get into that range. The next question you are going to ask yourself is how is your signal system performing? Can you justify the need to improve your signal system? And when we start talking about performance you have to consider that there is really no standard of performance for traffic signals. Traffic signals operate in a variety of different ways. We've got everything from electrical mechanical signals that are still out and not only are they operating, a lot of them are still being maintained and on the same token, you've got very advanced systems like, we'll say adaptive systems for instance. You've got Scats, scoot, and a high level of performance in some of these systems so how do you have that dichotomy of performance throughout the nation? So how do you compare r those? Frequently, we see that agencies are using the phone comment to gauge how their systems performing and typically, we'll see before and after studies, before and after we do signal retimings and then the other question in terms of performance is how do you report information about performance if you don't really have the ability to collect that data? What could you do with performance information if you had it readily available to you? I think one of the things you could do is certainly you could report that information to identify needs for improvement. If you could show that your objective was to perform at level A, and you're currently performing at level C, then you've identified a gap that immediates to be filled and you could somehow justify the types of improvements that would be necessary to go from level C to level A, and then you could also compare different facilities. It's difficult to compare different facilities without performance information so how do you compare a facility in say downtown Atlanta to one in suburban Georgia somewhere? And I'm hinging on the performance measures for a lot of reasons. One of the big ones is that traffic signals have to compete for resources with virtually every other type of capital improvement project whether it's filling potholes, building and repairing bridges which is probably growing in necessity right now, and resurfacing projects, and virtually every other type whether it's water, conservation, or whatever it may be, all of these typically have to compete in a public works setting for funding, so how do you compete for effectively to obtain funds for traffic signal Operations? One area that I think we haven't looked at the too closely and we probably should look at more closely is safety. For some reason, safety and certainly in the federal highway administration, our Office of Safety, my perception is that they're much well better funded than the Office of Operations, and one of the reasons is you can always justify things based on safety, and in 2002 that's when this data came from, we saw that there were roughly close to or just over 1. 2 million crashes at signaled intersections with over 460 of those resulting in either injury or fatality, so if we can somehow connect traffic signal Operations with safety, then that opens up another avenue of funding that we can use to deploy traffic signal systems, or improve their Operations, and there's certainly a connection between Operations and safety. In fact many of the measures that are implemented to improve safety also compliment operational measures that can also reduce congestion. There are a couple of documents that I'll show you in just a second but what they've done is identified signal timing measures that reduce crashes, and these are also quite closely related to some of the things that adaptive systems help to improve. We have studies that have shown that by providing progression, you can can actually reduce the number of rear end crashes, side swipes, and in some cases, even right angle crashes, and to improve progression, we're talking usually about providing interconnect, time base coordination , if you don't have communications between them and in a lot of cases we see centrally managed systems and systems that are really trying to improve the optimization of offsets. That's something that adaptive systems and certainly ACS Light will do. Also we're talking about optimization of signal timing, optimizing our phases and then there's also things like modifying clearance intervals and providing green extensions , and these are pretty much say that you need to have detection at your intersection, and once you have the detection and you've got the interconnect and you want the ability to do some optimization, that's where adaptive systems come in. There were two issue briefs that were issued late last year. I think around November, by the Office of Safety and both of these are available, if you send me an e-mail or you were to go to our safety website, you'd see these two issue briefs that you could download and they go over the potential counter measures to reduce crashes at intersections and it shows you pretty clearly what those signal timing counter measures are. But why it's important and why am I bringing up safety? I think it's because most of the people in the traffic signal Operations assume it, we've been singing the same song for a long time. These are pieces from the ITE journal and they go back moo 1975 and basically you see that we're talking about reducing fuel consumption and reducing delays and for some reason, this just hasn't got the engine started in a lot of our stakeholders that can provide the funding to improve a lot of signal systems, so I think we need to find now ways new story toss tell to justify how we obtain funding for signal systems. Traffic signal control logic really hasn't changed much in the last probably 50 years, and that kind of goes in line with what I'm saying about funding. I consider traffic signal control evolution to really follow two tracks. First track I would say is really what's happening at the local intersection level and that's the domain of our vendor s, the guys that make the signal Controllers, the interconnect, all that business, and then the other track I would say has been mostly the public sector track, and this was where you've got public agencies like the Fed call Highway Administration and your University transportation centers that are developing ways to improve traffic signals, and for a long time, the private vendors that make the Controllers and the public sector really haven't had much of a connection. I think with the kind of ACS Light coming on the scene it's probably the first time we've really had a real relationship between the public sector and our vendors to agree on a technology to improve traffic signal Operations, and I'll go through some of the motivation for that in a few minutes. Let's talk about the benefits of adaptive signal timing. We found that adaptive signal timing, a variety of studies, that adaptive signal timing is more responsive to traffic conditions, improvements to reduce delays and we've certainly seen a reduction in the offset of saturated conditions. And a lot of cases reduces or eliminates the need to retime traffic signals, and we've estimated that the cost to retime a signal system is about 1800-$3500 per intersection, there abouts, and we've seen improvements over time in day plans and I'll go into that in a second and certainly they give you the ability to do some data collection, archiving, and give you an avenue to measure some of your performance. Now let's talk about our signal timing design. Signal timing is typically designed for three peak periods. Most agencies that I've visited, I usually see no less than three signal timing plans, a.m., midday, p.m., and a lot of times your midday plan is what's used for the off peak. What I'm showing here is if you follow that kind of the white line, it would show the capacity that's introduced by each signal plan, so this would be your a.m. plan, over here would be your midday and then this would be your p.m. plan. And what happens is these plans are designed based on current conditions, which would be represented by the light black line, and then as traffic conditions change, that's represented by the dark black line so you you could can see here that we've basically designed our timing for our 15 minute peaks, for our a.m., midday, and p.m. time periods, and then whether it would be six months from the time this design was donor whether it's three years or six years, whatever the case may be, those traffic patterns have changed significantly enough to where we're not meeting the capacity demands of that intersection, and what happens is you get delay, you get standing cues, you get over saturation, and what do adaptive systems provide you? How can they help you solve this problem? Well adaptive systems would actually compensate for this change in demand by adjusting your split to offset and cycle length if necessary, and then another thing about our signal timing plan is we build delay into our plans in a lot of cases. We could see in this plan, this a.m. plan is coming in at about 5:00 in the morning, and our traffic really doesn't get heavy until about 6:30-7:00, so realistically, we didn't have to implement this plan until probably 6:30. So we've actually built some delay into this a.m. plan and it actually happens in the p.m. too, by when we implement these timing plans. And that's another avenue that adaptive introduces in how to reduce the delays in signal timing plans. Our signal timing plans are typically designed using this process. There's a trigger event. We go out and identify intersections, we collect our before data, surveys, get our turning movement counts, design our timing, and then we go out and begin to evaluate it. Well how efficient is that process? Well here is a little calculation that I did, and when you collect 15 minute, or utilizing your peak 15 minute data always throughout everything else except for my peak 15 minute data when I designed a timing plan and I'd do that, say I'm going to design four plans and do that for the a.m., midday, p.m. and off peak so those plans run for three hours a peak, it's 15 hours per day, five days a week, I'm not going to do anything for the weekend and you either run 52 weeks a year and if we go with best practice, that means we're going to re time every three years. So roughly, these four timing plans will run for a total of 11, 720 hours, and when you consider the data that you've collected, to design those plans you've actually got a representative sample of about . 0085% of the number of hours that that plan will actually run. So, kind of going back to the previous slide on how we design timing, we can see why we have so many periods of inefficiency in a timing plan. So how does adaptive small timing do anything to help that? Well a typical timing plan is implemented and we see about a 25% improvement in the delay and travel time for that intersection, and what happens is the traffic patterns change over a period of say two to five years and that timing plan becomes less effective. With an adaptive system what you're doing is you're able to compensate for those changes in demand, so you're able to prolong the effectiveness of signal timing. I've heard a lot of people say that adaptive systems improve signal timing over time of day and I would probably say that's not very accurate or I'd tend to say they prolong the effectiveness because you probably should come up with the same timing solution at the time you implement a timing plan is what an adaptive system would come up with, so if you do a retiming today, and implement an adaptive system within that probably first six months, you probably would see no improvement, but over the long term, say five years, you should see no reduction in the effectiveness of that timing plan. So where have adaptive systems been deployed? Over the last Oh, about 20-25 years we've seen about 25 systems pop-up throughout the country. The largest market share of adaptive systems is held by SCATS right now and that was an adaptive system developed in Sidney, Australia. The second most common system would be SCOOT, and now actually with ACS Light coming on, we're probably, we have more deployment than any of the other systems. In terms of the number of intersections, there are about 272000 traffic signals estimated throughout the United States, and only less than 1% of that or about 2005 signals are able to or installed with any type of adaptive technology so that's less than 1% of all of the traffic signals in the United States have any adaptive ability. So the question is, why is that? If the benefits are so compelling and we're going to get all of these great gains in terms of travel time and prolonging the effect of the signal timing, why aren't there more systems? Well the primary reason for that is that these systems, some of them cost incredible amounts of money to deploy, and not only do they Costa Lt. To get on the ground, there's extensive calibration and monitoring that's required, the detectors are crucial in a system so if you don't have a good system to maintain traffic detectors, you're not going to get good performance out of an adaptive system and then there's significant communications overhead. A lot of cases you need more technical staffing because the systems have traffic models that run in the background and you need people that are familiar with those, and almost every adaptive system should have a disclaimer that says, " Will not operate in over saturated conditions". So what happens when you deploy an adaptive system? In a typical system, I think these are four variables, cost performance, proactive Management and data, what type of data is the system providing you and a typical system, you get pretty small performance because you don't really monitor a lot and then our proactive Management requirement is pretty low because we're just going to retime and follow best practice and retime every three to five years and as a result of that, I don't require a lot of data. The system is not providing a lot so I don't collect much. With an adaptive system, you're cost for deployment and Operations will certainly go up, but you also see an improvement in your performance and you're going to be required to do a certain level of proactive managing because now your communications and detection systems become critical. But you're also responding to traffic conditions as they change which gives you a greater level of performance which you can report. So what were the goals for ACS Light? Well primarily we wanted to lower the cost of getting into the adaptive market and that meant that you needed to be able to utilize a lot of the existing infrastructure because that's where a lot of the costs are in deploying some of the more what will be considered fully adaptive systems. We wanted to provide improvements over typical time of daytiming and have connectivity to a TMC, although we do provide for that and we wanted to promote the use of NTC/IP. Kind of going back to my graph earlier, the cost, we have significantly reduced the cost to get into an adaptive system. We feel we haven't had a real good evaluation against the SCA T or a SCOOT system. We've got a lot of interest against people doing that and we haven't gone" yet but we do think they probably perform relative to these other systems probably at the same or maybe a better level, and you are going to be required to do some level of proactive Management meaning you will have to actively maintain your communications and detection systems, and you will get a high resolution of data from your system that you can report in terms of performance. To develop ACS Light, federal highway administration formed a public partnership, Siemens ITS headed up the actual development of the software, Purdue and University of Arizona helped out in that effort and then on the deployment side, on our signal control manufacturers, our Controller manufacturers included Econo Light eagle which is now owned by seem ebbs, Mcane and Peak, Siemens. The integration site, there were four integration sites, each corresponds to one of the manufacturers, and what these integration sites were were basically a test of the ACS Light software with that Controller manufacturers firmwear. And it just so happens that while we were doing this test which was actually out in the field, we collected evaluation data, so we do have some before and after data in times of travel time and delay reductions an then we Tyler Texas who was the first deployment site for ACS Light. In terms of benefits, and reductions to travel tim, delay and fuel consumption using the TTI method, for calculating unit cost, our first deployment was in Gahanna, Ohio, that was an Econo Light test site and we saw a benefit cost annualized benefit of $88, 408. The second test site was Houston, Texas, it was an Eagle site and we saw an annual cost savings of $57 7,000, Braydenton was the Peak system site, and we saw $75 7,000 annual benefit there, and then the last test site was an integration with McCain systems and that annual benefit was estimated at $327 thousand. How do you explain the differences in these figures? I think it comes down to a variety of things I think as we rolled out ACS Light, I Think it actually improved over time , and they learned lessons, so as you go from left to right it kind of shows that progression of deployment or integration test, and then there's also some factors in terms of when was the system retimed last? And if you re timed probably within a year, and you deploy ACS Light, you probably shouldn't see a huge improvement but what you would see is if you were to do a long term study I think you would see significant gains over a long period of time. Okay, and that's pretty much it for my presentation. I don't think I saw any questions come through the chat box. If you do have a question, feel free to type it in there and we'll try to address those at the end of all three presentations. And at this point, I'm going to turn it over to Dr. Steve Shelby, who will talk about the development and functionality of ACS Light. All right, thank you for the introduction. I guess this is something that I'd like to do in these presentations is a little before and after survey, give everyone a chance here to get on the little chat window and maybe reveal your position as to whether you're a skeptic or a believer, or on the fence line about adaptive control. And then maybe we'll see where we stand afterwards. There are a number of skeptics out there so that's perfectly fine. I'll just move on here. So this is kind of my, I can't quite see all of the slides because that poll is coming up but this is kind of the one slide version of the talk. We've got, this is one intersection under adaptive control on the left and normal control on the right. It's not normal traffic conditions on the right for whatever reason, there's a surge in that north bound left turn traffic if you look where that arrow is, you can see, I have a little pointer here, you can see left turns spill out of the left turn bay and off the end of the screen here, and for whatever reason, traffic diversion due to accidents or construction or special events, that's going on and then the adaptive control.