From Southwest Research Institute

Southwest Research Institute is leading an $8 million project to develop a data exchange platform enabling the Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT) to analyze road conditions in real-time and communicate important travel information to the traveling public, state/local government entities, private sector partners and other stakeholders. In addition to real-time analysis, the platform will also support analysis of long-term historic data enabling data-driven infrastructure investments and various research initiatives.

“The primary goal of this technology is to save lives and move people more efficiently on roadways by sharing real-time driving conditions,” said Michael A. Brown, an SwRI Intelligent Systems Division engineer overseeing the project. “This data exchange will lay the foundation for FDOT to send alerts to drivers and traffic managers to coordinate routing, road closures and emergency response.”

The FDOT project will be among the first in the United States to develop a vehicle-to-everything (V2X) data exchange, capturing data from thousands of devices across connected and automated vehicle (CAV) and infrastructure networks. A key objective of the project is to standardize the collection, analysis and sharing of data from several proprietary systems, which have different coding and encryption methodologies, and to make additional considerations for privacy and safety.

The V2X Data Exchange Platform (DEP) is intended to encompass the FDOT’s operational, in-development and planned CAV project corridors.

“The system will enable FDOT to disseminate real-time CAV information to the automobile industry, logistics providers and other third parties to consume for their specific applications,” said Dan Rossiter, an SwRI assistant program manager.

The exchange will capture anonymous data both from standardized onboard units communicating directly with FDOT-owned roadside units and from the proprietary data feeds of various car manufacturers. This connected vehicle data will be fused with a breadth of other data both from FDOT-owned infrastructure and from third-party data feeds. This stream of enriched data will be the basis for real-time and historic analysis, leveraging a combination of machine learning and traditional algorithms.

Participants in the FDOT program include Ford Mobility, which will supply V2X data from its connected vehicle platform; Iteris, a smart mobility company based in California; Florida International University; Amazon Web Services; Google; and several OEMs and logistics and fleet companies.

Owned by FDOT, the resulting data exchange will be available for use by other public agencies throughout the United States. This license agreement enables platform standardization across the industry and provides mutually beneficial cost-sharing to develop new and improved functionality over time. SwRI has facilitated similar license agreements for decades in relation to ActiveITS, an advanced transportation management system originally developed in collaboration between FDOT and the Texas Department of Transportation and now in use broadly across the nation.

SwRI is a leader in development of intelligent transportation systems and machine learning technologies with software deployments at transportation agencies across the United States.

For more information, visit Intelligent Transportation Systems.