Annual Report Year 2009 - Civil and Environmental Engineering

PROGRAM AREAS
TRANSPORTATION INFRASTRUCTURE AND SYSTEMS ENGINEERING
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international visiting scholar.
He successfully completed a VTRCfunded
research project on traffic responsive
control. The research findings
(guidelines on traffic responsive control
implementations) have received significant
interest from the Northern Region Operations
Office of the Virginia Department
of Transportation (VDOT), which in turn
decided to publicize this effort and implement
the guidelines this fall.
Abbas is currently working on providing
VDOT with guidelines for their implementation
of the next generation control
system. He is also working on developing
strategies for operating signal systems
in oversaturated conditions in collaboration
with other researchers at the national
level.
Abbas continues to serve as the chair
on an Institute of Transportation Engineers
(ITE) traffic engineering council committee
on traffic responsive control and as a
member of the Transportation Research
Board (TRB) Traffic Signal Systems committee,
Artificial Intelligence and Advanced
Computing Applications committee, and
the joint subcommittee on intersection. Abbas
also serves as a member on several
NCHRP panels.
Thomas Dingus, Newport News Shipbuilding
Professor and human factors and
safety transportation researcher, continues
to direct the Virginia Tech Transportation
Institute (VTTI), comprised of six
transportation research centers.
VTTI continues to be the largest university-level
research center at Virginia Tech
with over $20.5 million in total expenditures
for FY 2009. VTTI has grown to almost
300 faculty, staff, and students with a
total budget that will exceed $34,000,000
next year.
VTTI continues to operate and manage
the Smart Road research facility, a closed
test-bed track built to state and federal
highway specifications and designed specifically
for transportation research.
This year represents the third year that
VTTI conducted research as the National
Surface Transportation Safety Center for
Excellence (NSTSCE), tasked with using
38 | VIA REPORT | 2009
research to improve driver safety in both
rural and urban communities.
This year, new NSTSCE projects, such
as a study on Roadway Lighting Design
and Safety and Naturalistic Observation of
Motorcycle Riders, are underway.
VTTI continues to be recognized as a
world leader for offering a “one-stop shop”
for transportation-related research and
testing both on Virginia’s Smart Road as
well as in the growing field of naturalistic
driving research.
Gerardo Flintsch, associate professor
and director of the Center for Sustainable
Transportation Infrastructure (CSTI) at the
Virginia Tech Transportation Institute, has
been appointed a chair of the infrastructure
systems committee of the American
Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE).
With his research group, integrated by
Edgar de Leon, Billy Hobbs, Samer Katicha,
and students Mario Candia, Ryland
Musick, Mohammad Dehghani, Stacey
Diefenderfer, Oscar Gonzalez, Julio Roa,
Sameer Shetty, Jack Verhoeven, Crysta
Highfield, Shahriar Najafi, and Jae In, he
has continued to grow CSTI’s pavement
engineering and transportation asset management
programs.
His two ongoing collaborative efforts
with the Virginia Transportation Research
Council, the Pavement Surface Properties
Consortium and the Virginia Sustainable
Pavement Research Consortium (VA-
SPRC) continued developing solutions
in the pavement engineering field, and
training students in this critical field for
supporting sustainable economic growth.
Collaboration between the VA-SPRC, and
the Transport Research Laboratory and
University of Nottingham in the U.K. has
resulted in two federal research contracts
to develop “splash and spray” assessment
tools and continuous measuring deflection
devices, funded by the Federal Highway
Administration and the National Academy
of Sciences, respectively.
Flintsch and his students published six
journal papers, 14 peer-reviewed conference
papers, four other conference
papers, and two research reports and delivered
many presentations at national and
international conferences.
Two students completed their degrees
and two received awards and recognitions
this year. Roa received an International
Road Federation Fellowship, and Highfield,
a Via Fellowship recipient, received
a SAIC Fellowship and a Dwight David
Eisenhower Transportation Program Grant
for Research Fellowship.
Flintsch taught classes on civil engineering
materials, pavement design and
management, and advanced pavement
design and delivered a workshop on Introduction
to Mechanistic Empiric Design of
Flexible Pavements, in Monterrey Mexico
and a short course on Quality Control of
Pavement Condition Data Collection via
internet in Bucaramanga, Colombia.
Flintsch also integrated the steering
committees for four large national and
international conferences, organized/
chaired sessions at national and international
conferences and meetings, and has
continued to develop international collaborations
between the CSTI and the Politecnico
di Milano, Italy, Universidad Católica,
Chile, and Technische Universität Darmstadt,
Germany, and the Universidad Javeriana
and CORSFALTOS, Colombia.
Kathleen Hancock continues her research
in geospatially enabling solutions
to transportation problems for freight planning
and operations, response planning
for hazardous materials incidents, urban
micro-simulation of traffic, and transportation
right-of-way information management.
She also continues as the co-director
for the Center for Geospatial Information
Technology in the National Capital Region
which is expanding into Geospatial Intelligence
and Health GIT (geospatial information
technology).
In partnership with her recently graduated
doctoral student, Qifeng Lu, she
has submitted patent applications for two
advanced bivariate best first search algorithms.
Hancock is initiating a new master of
engineering degree in the National Capital
Region focused on geospatial engineering.
It is designed to educate professionals
and recent graduates in bringing the
power of geospatially reference informa-
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