Human or natural disasters affect communities, disrupt lives and cause significant interferences to transportation functionalities of a society. The resistance and recovery capabilities of a transportation system are identified as the resiliency of the system. This project proposes a comprehensive study on the risk and resiliency profiles on North Carolina public roads, specifically primary and secondary freight routes with the objective of establishing a geospatial analytics platform for transportation data integration and modeling. The platform, identified as “Geo-FRIT", provides a web-based geospatial analytics tool for quantifying freight risk and resilience in transportation. Geo-FRIT will allow for data collection and sharing among DOT divisions, and routing analytics as well as advanced modeling of disaster data for risk-based freight routing through spatial simulation-driven scenario analysis.
In Geo-FRIT, we will implement a geospatial-temporal data sharing platform using Web GIS (Geographic Information Systems) dashboard, which can be of great help for complex transportation planning, operations and emergency management. Advanced data analytics in response to disruptive events can provide substantial support for engineers on, for example, early detection of critical freight conditions or resiliency projection during disasters. The Geo-FRIT platform can provide the integration of transportation and disaster data and presentation of risk and resilience modeling results with a statewide GIS-based dashboard.
This project can enhance freight management and safety via web-based data access, integration, and automation, which also promotes transportation resiliency. NCDOT can benefit substantially from state-of-the-art geospatial technologies that allow for the automated fusion and dissemination of digital data associated with risk-based freight rerouting. Moreover, the proposed integrated platform can help researchers in modeling transportation resiliency and risks during various disasters. The Geo-FRIT tool provides solid support for risk-based freight routing analysis that can lead to significant labor and operational cost savings for NCDOT and enhance highway safety, emergency management, community transportation planning, and public health.
