The Nevada Department of Transportation (NDOT) is responsible for maintaining and improving Nevada's highway system.
Their Las Vegas team operates a Traffic Management Center. When an incident occurs, they coordinate with emergency services and highway management.
The challenge.
Traffic control operators were facing several challenges due to the increasing scale of the network they monitor, including:
- The initial challenge of effectively detecting incidents across hundreds of miles of road network via cameras.
- The growing complexity of coordinating an appropriate, multi-agency response, requiring close collaboration with emergency services and highway maintenance teams.
- The delay between an incident and the public calling 911 to report it.
The approach.
We looked at the way the teams worked holistically to understand their needs and the root causes of the problems they were facing.
Our analysis incorporated new data sources, including real-time network views from social media feeds like Waze, alongside new sensors and vehicle telematics, significantly broadening the scope of available information.
The method of aggregating and presenting this data to end-users was paramount to the project success, with multiple agencies to coordinate, communication was often noisy and complex due to constant radio chatter. Our solution was designed to provide clarity and certainty of an incident, ensuring we didn't add more 'noise' with increased data points.
The chosen solution was to produce a dashboard accessible to team members across the road network giving them access to new real-time data, deep learning, and streamlined inter-agency workflows to predict and respond to incidents across hundreds of miles of the road network.
This approach made the workforce smarter and faster by focusing on the interactions and workflows that empower people to act with greater speed, agility, and confidence.
The solution.
We provided operators with clear, actionable dashboards displaying real-time data and using AI to monitor traffic and predict possible incidents.
The clear, actionable dashboards, developed in collaboration with users, saw a high adoption rate, leading to:
- 15-minute reduction in emergency services response time.
- 9% reduction in incident mitigation time.
- 95% reduction of radio chatter.
