This Performance Monitoring & Measurement System (PMMS) is a software program totally developed and written using in-house staff in the Regional Transportation Commission of Southern Nevada’s (RTC), Freeway and Arterial System of Transportation (FAST) division.  It provides an easy-to-understand web-based user interface (the “Dashboard”) to enable the public to pull and depict real-time and historical freeway network monitoring and performance information in a wide variety of user-selectable and user-customizable displays.  PMMS builds on the enormous storehouse of raw data automatically gathered by the Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) that Nevada Department of Transportation (NDOT) has implemented on its freeway network in southern Nevada, plus incident-specific data points created by NHP’s dispatchers and FAST’s technicians. By integrating these data, PMMS not only develops charts and graphs showing trends and ‘report cards’ on freeway performance, but also enables the user to quantitatively characterize the discrete traffic flows. For the public, it can provide basic travel time related information; for FAST and NDOT technical analysts, it is rich-featured analytical tool whose primary output is the magnitude of traffic delays experienced for various alternative study scenarios; for other transportation professionals, it is a platform to obtain meaningful transportation information.  As a result, the PMMS software satisfies the various demands from the public to transportation professionals and the decision makers.

There are three critical aspects in the PMMS:

• Data quality control

• Comprehensive performance measures - automatic calculation

• In-depth transportation operation analysis

The main objectives that FAST’s software designers used to guide the development of PMMS include (but are not limited to):

• Promote the usage of a comprehensive performance measurement system, data quality control procedure and archived data to state and local agencies;

• Monitor, track, and report freeway traffic congestion level and travel reliability trends on a regional scale using archived data;

• Help in calibrating and maintaining the field ITS equipment to ensure complete and accurate raw data confident analyses;

• Conversion of the raw data into easily-grasped and truly meaningful information used by different user groups;

• Improve the number, richness and quality of traveler information services over time;

• Provide a tool that can quantitatively assess events that influence congestion including traffic accidents, construction and special events;

• Extract and identify congestion both temporally and spatially (together);

• Extract and characterize “normal” traffic flow for typical day groups (Mon-Thur, Fri, Weekend & Holidays);

• Enhance the roadway performance visibility for the public, transportation professionals and decision makers;

• Provide data support for performance-based planning process;

• Provide data support for continued deployment of ITS infrastructure throughout NDOT’s complete freeway traffic network in southern Nevada;

• Help in allocating resources and prioritizing implementation from an operation’s improvement perspective;

• Evaluate the effectiveness of a variety of operational strategies (both conceptual and post-implementation), thus improving their accountability to the public and decision makers, and helping to derive accurate and defensible benefit-cost ratios.

Comments about, and critiques of, your experience in using PMMS are very much welcomed, so as to guide our improvement of the tool over time.  Click on the Contact Us button in the Dashboard menu to generate the user comment form.