Recent events have shaped the world's approach to transportation safety and the marshalling of resources to respond to several potentially damaging scenarios. Paramount to successfully managing these situations is the rapid movement of emergency personnel and vehicles, the control of vital transportation arteries, and the ability to react in real-time over a wide geographic area using a variety of communications means and host of emergency and environmental services. Accomplishment of this crucial task is fundamental to saving lives and national interests. Although a worldwide challenge, the local government agencies are the first line of defense. Through the foresight of several state & county government transportation agencies and visionary commercial entities, selected portions of rapid response engineering development models are recently in the evaluation stage and presently in the production phase to leverage the latest technology and lessons learned policies into our emergency procedures. The challenge for evaluating these types of system centers on the integration of a diverse set of technologies that employ a standard set of information and communication tools. This set of tools provides the services and resources necessary to collect information, enhance decision-making, and control emergency personnel and resources. Thus, solving the problem requires the integration of sensors (gather video, traffic, & mobile data), information presentation graphics for the display of vital information (decision support systems), and communication (physical, visual, audio, and data for controlling resources). This paper provides a description of the design, development, evaluation, results, and recommendations of automatic gate closure projects involving the public/private partnership between industry, government, and academia.
Abstract