This is a shortened version of the winning paper of the 1995 The award is besfowed annually on a paper reporting on Young Consu/tant$ Award. The award recognizes achievefranspottafion consulting activities. ment in transportation consulting by younger employees of April 30 is the deadline for the 1996 competition. Contact member firms of the /TE Transportation Consuitfmt$ Councii, iTEHeadquarte...

continued on page 6 The snow falls. It falls thickly, saturating the air, swirling on gusts of wind. At times, white, dull white snow striking your windshield is all you can see. You pass by Donner Summit, on I-80, tires skidding slightly on the freshly plowed road. The snow clears slightly, and you are greeted with the sight of a huge machine, a 20-ton snowblower, blowing snow out next to the ...

This paper presents a mobile image-based system for measuring the brightness of highway signs at night time, so that visibility standards for signs can be evaluated and maintained to protect the safety of the motoring public. The system is composed of a high speed IEEE-1394 digital camera, and a laptop computer with a purpose-designed measuring software, which is composed of three modules: 1) I...

1 Traffic signs are an integral element of any transportation network; however, keeping records of 2 those signs and their conditions is a tedious process, which is both time consuming and labour 3 intensive. As a result, many agencies around the world have been working towards automating the 4 process of sign collection. One form of automation is using remote sensing techniques to extract 5 tr...

Extended Abstract The Automated Highway Systems (AHS) project at UC-Berkeley is part of a comprehensive program initiated by the U.S. government under the Intermodal Surface Transportation EEciency Act of 1991 to improve safety and reduce congestion in the surface transportation system. UC-Berkeley's PATH program is a partner in the nine-member National AHS Consortium (NAHSC)heed Martin and Par...

We present a routing guidance approach that can be used in Automated Highway Systems (AHS). We consider automated highway systems in which intelligent vehicles organised in platoons drive to their destination, controlled by a hierarchical control framework. In this framework there are roadside controllers that provide speed and lane allocation instructions to the platoons. These roadside contro...

This paper describes a prototype of a digital video image analysis system that measures the relative luminance of highway signs using nighttime video images taken by a camera mounted in a moving vehicle. The concept is that by using an inexpensive video camera and laptop computer mounted in a vehicle a measurement of the brightness and visibility of the sign can be made. The system uses real ti...

We investigate the e ect of a number of design alternatives on the safety and capacity of an Automated Highway System. Our methodology makes use of two computational tools, designed to highlight the fundamental limitations of the vehicle dynamics, sensing and control strategies and inter-vehicle communication. The rst tool produces the minimum spacing necessary for two vehicles not to collide, ...