Abstract:

"Texas A&M Transportation Institute’s (TTI) air quality program has been using an integrated data analytics tool (Microsoft Power BI) to improve their collaborative research work and communication with project sponsors. The team uses this system to prepare and process data of different types (traffic, emission, ambient concentrations, weather, etc.), estimate impacts, perform data exploration and statistical analysis, in an interactive visual environment. TTI researchers use the system to automate all the steps involved in this process. The TTI team uses Power BI’s interactive visual dashboarding and mapping capabilities to examine and analyze multiple scenarios and isolate and evaluate the impacts of specific combinations of parameters. The adoption of Power BI as the data integration and automation platform for research has resulted in substantial gains in terms of productivity, better and deeper understanding of the trends, and effective communication of results and findings.
Through multiple examples from their recent research studies, the authors will show and describe how they use Power BI as an integrated data system and demonstrate how their research has benefited from it. Figure 1 shows and examples of the dashboards that have been developed by TTI’s air quality team. Using interactive data visualization dashboards, the research team was able to answer more question with a greater depth than it is possible through the traditional tools and methods. "