Every agency within the Coalition shares a common goal: ensuring the safety and efficiency of work zones. A significant focus area for 2024 has been identifying and collaborating on technological solutions to schedule, manage, and communicate work zones effectively. These solutions aim to provide accurate and reliable information to the public and facilitate seamless coordination across state boundaries.
The initial step was to gather information from each member agency on their current processes for work zone data collection and validation. From there, the common steps of the process were identified and an ideal workflow was established, with a focus on automation and data reliability.
Each Smart Belt Coalition member is working to identify specific action items within their own agency that will begin to align their current work zone data collection and validation policies and processes with the ideal workflow.
The ideal workflow (as shown in the image):
One of the primary lessons learned from the truck platooning demonstration previously conducted by the SBC was the need for a greater understanding of data needs and availability between the SBC and ADS developers.
During the demonstration, the data requests from the ADS developer were broad and did not contain specific parameters. Some data requested were not available from the agencies, as they typically do not maintain: real-time or near real-time inventories or conditions of assets; features, such as pavement marking quality; or the location of retaining walls, large trees, or where shadows are present.
Through this initiative, the SBC reached out and facilitated interviews with different ADS technology developers as well as other organizations and initiatives focusing on sharing data to better understand data sharing needs and opportunities, and, in-general, how the SBC can support the industry.
In October of 2020, the Smart Belt Coalition conducted a demonstration of truck platooning and automated driving system (ADS) technology to test the administrative and procedural requirements necessary for a truck platooning system to operate continuously through a multi-jurisdictional environment. Through a request for information (RFI) process, the SBC partnered with Locomation, who developed a trucking technology platform to combine AI-driven autonomy with driver augmentation, for this initiative.
The demonstration traversed over 300 miles across all five agency jurisdictions and transported food between the Greater Pittsburgh Area Food Bank in Pennsylvania, the Toledo NW Ohio Food bank in Ohio, and the Forgotten Harvest Food Rescue Organization in Michigan.
