Central Data Warehouse

With over 12,000 miles of instrumented roadway and over 3,000 transportation sensors deployed, the FDOT utilizes a wealth of data to help fulfill their traffic operations mission. However, the data collected can be used to achieve so much more than live traffic operations alone. The initial challenge is finding a way to make this rich data available for other potential users and to encourage them to take full advantage of the data. Having a "one-stop shop" for all of Florida's traffic data has always been part of the Transportation Management and Systems Operations Program's vision. In 2003, the University of Florida (UF) developed a prototype central data warehouse (CDW), known as the Statewide Transportation Warehouse for Archived Regional Data (STEWARD). STEWARD proved the concept to be very useful, as evidenced by the support received from FDOT's Planning Office. As more and more users were becoming dependent upon FDOT's CDW system, the need for a production system with higher reliability was identified and FDOT began its search for a production CDW solution.

In 2012, FDOT contracted with the University of Maryland (UMD) to host FDOT's data and use UMD's existing and enhanced tools provided by their Regional Integrated Transportation Information System (RITIS). RITIS has at least three datacenters establishing high reliability. The fleet of server and storage systems provides the necessary horsepower for delivering performance through a rich graphical user interface (GUI), showcasing impressive visual analytics.

RITIS has all of the standard features that would be expected from a CDW system for real-time and archived traffic data. As shown in the pictures below, the GUI facilitates a rich and intuitive user interaction. The images below show the live traffic map with detector and incident locations, the incident list, and an incident timeline. Other tools include heat maps of traffic flow and congestion and a web query system for archived data. FDOT also had a few unique requirements that were met by enhancements to RITIS. New tools developed specifically for FDOT's needs now produce travel-time reliability and roadway performance measures. RITIS users, including the planning and safety offices, as well as university and consulting firms, can use the system and its data for many different types of research, analysis, studies, and other systems. RITIS also has an application programming interface for FDOT-developed tools to access and process data from within external software.