Visualizing Performance Metrics of Truck Parking Information Management System

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Yilun Yang, 

PRESENTATION DESCRIPTION

Parking shortage has been one of the biggest challenges faced by truck drivers, fleet managers and owner-operators for many years. Truck Parking Information Management System (TPIMS) have been deployed in a number of states to communicate real-time parking information to truck drivers to maximize utilization of existing truck parking facilities.
A data dashboard was developed to display and evaluate the performance of the Iowa TPIMS through multidimensional aggregation of parking flow record, allowing decision-makers to examine the short-term and long-run trend of truck parking and to monitor the effectiveness and reliability of the system. In particular, performance measures in terms of utilization, demand cycle and reliability were developed and visualized in dashboards. For example, when the number of available spots is below a certain threshold (usually 10% of the site’s capacity), ‘LOW’ will be displayed instead of the actual available spaces. Double pointer method was applied to detect all the time intervals that ‘LOW’ was shown to truck drivers. Those intervals were then aggregated daily as a metric, defined as Daily Low Duration, to measure how busy a specific site is. In addition, the system downtime measure evaluates the percentage of time the system is not functioning as intended. The data for each site is queried to determine if there are data records for at least each five-minute time period. The gaps were then aggregated as the System Down metric. System downtime was often investigated at monthly and quarterly level to avoid random failure in the short run.

*Figure in pdf file.

The visualization tool can help agencies better understand parking data and shed light on how the information system influence the parking activities on major corridor in Iowa. The above figure shows a snapshot of the highly interactive dashboard, which enables decision makers to select any interested site and time span to examine the performance. By selecting sites in the ‘Map Selector’ in the upper left panel, average daily low duration (in minutes) and system downtime (in percentage) will be shown on the top of the dashboard in a quarterly averaged manner as a summative evaluation for the agencies’ reference, and monthly summary is also available if user hover his cursor on a quarter’s summary result. In addition, spatial distribution of utilization can be examined when a set of adjacent sites are included in ‘Map Selector.’ Temporal distribution showing the 24-hour trend can also be observed in the ‘Utilization 24 Hour Trend’ panel to evaluate the parking demand cycles of different sites and time spans. Such intuitive tools and results can help agencies evaluate the system and better understand the large dataset to make informed decisions.

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PRESENTATION FILE