PRODUCTS OVERVIEW

Transportation measurement systems are common. Measuring the performance of your transportation system isn't. Performance measurement is usually the last feature put into a transportation measurement system. Quite often, sensor data is only stored online for a limited amount of time, after which it's placed on tape media. After it gets on tape, it is usually irretrievable due to inertia, lost knowledge or just lack of skilled personnel to extract it. We believe that this approach is fundamentally wrong. We believe that sensor data should be stored online forever and that it should be used to characterize the performance of the system over time. These results can then be used in long-term planning, empirical studies, and freeway operations.

The Freeway Performance Measurement Systems, PeMS, is a unique system that uses highly sophisticated statistical algorithms to extract more information from your existing sensor system. It then uses this information to compute long-term performance measures over your freeway system. The system presents the results to the users through intuitive, web-based charts and tables. It allows users to start with system-wide performance measures (such as delay, throughput, and travel time reliability) and then to drill down to individual geographic regions, freeways, and eventually to individual loop detectors themselves. PeMS was designed and built over the last four years by BTS in cooperation with the University of California, Berkeley and Caltrans.

BTS sells PeMS in two modes. First, you can purchase a standalone system which can be installed at your local site and integrated into your other transportation management systems. Alternatively, you can purchase PeMS as a service. In this scenario, BTS would collect your freeway sensor data in real-time and transport it to our facilities. Once there, we would filter it, apply our diagnostic routines, perform the proper level of imputation, and aggregate across various spatial and temporal dimensions. The results are then presented to the users via a series of dynamic web pages. Full user account control is given to the customer, with the ability to give different users permission to see different parts of the site.