Piloting Connected Vehicle Technology

Connected vehicle (CV) technology improves safety and mobility on our roadways. Since 2015, Trihydro has assisted the Wyoming Department of Transportation (WYDOT) in developing and deploying its growing connected vehicle network, which has ranged from Dedicated Short-Range Communication (DSRC) to Cellular Vehicle-to-Everything (C-V2X). This includes our work building and deploying the Situation Data Exchange (SDX), a CV cloud-based data exchange platform that enables statewide connectivity.  

In 2015, the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) selected Wyoming as one of three sites in the country to design, build, and test phases for a regional Connected Vehicle (CV) Pilot Deployment Program. The CV Pilot Program, sponsored by the USDOT Intelligent Transportation Systems Joint Program Office, aimed to use cutting-edge technologies and applications to improve safety and reduce the environmental impacts of personal driving.

The Trihydro team was selected as the technical and application lead, initially tasked with expanding the scope of mobile data collection from equipped vehicles (i.e., WYDOT snowplows and other equipped fleets that operate in the highway corridor) and developing new applications that provide in-vehicle advisories on adverse weather conditions, speed limits, and even parking availability. The program’s goal was to reduce traffic crashes on I-80, enhance the safety of road users, and improve WYDOT’s emergency response and recovery times. The project included:

• Deploying and testing Onboard Units (OBUs) from various vendors on fleet vehicles, including a combination of snowplows, maintenance fleet vehicles, emergency vehicles, and private trucks. These vehicles then broadcast a basic safety message and remotely send vehicle and road condition data to WYDOT Transportation Management Centers.
• Overseeing the development of several applications to support wide-area travel advisories, variable speed limit postings, forecast road condition information, detours, and parking notifications.
• Developing and demonstrating vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) and vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) applications for weather-responsive variable speed limits, work zone advisories, and incident alerts.
• Conducting formal user acceptance testing and installing CV infrastructure.
• Setting up a WYDOT CV test environment and gates for safe production deployment of tested code.
• Capturing, managing, and evaluating vehicle data.
• Participant training and stakeholder education.
• Developed systems to cascade road closures, including road closures for local roads when primary routes are closed, to avoid vehicle incidents on side roads.
• Built and deployed Situation Data Exchange (SDX), the primary platform for data sharing amongst state agencies of Connected Vehicle data.

While the project began with the goal of informing drivers on I-80 in Wyoming about situational data, the addition of satellite technology allowed Trihydro to expand coverage. By sharing data through the SDX platform, Trihydro was able to provide TIM coverage across all of Wyoming’s state and federal highways.

Trihydro continues to support the WYDOT team in deploying CV technologies. Recent projects include collaborating with WYDOT and Google on a road closures project to prevent drivers from using local roads as detours during winter closures of I-80 and other highways. Additionally, Trihydro is currently working on a project with WYDOT to deploy Smart Work Zone (SWZ) technology, designed to help ground-truth work zone data and distribute the results through the same CV methods employed by the pilot project.