Graphic Traffic Events Creator - Preliminary Specification

The purpose of this tools is to provide a Graphical User Interface to allow the author of an Incident Script to build a file of traffic events to be used by CPTMS to show colored dots on the highway display that represent traffic congestion.

The concept is a CPTMS like display that is enhanced to allow user interaction. The author will click on dots on the highway network to specify VDS stations whose values are to be modified.

The current CPTMS display will be enhanced to include two additional controls:

1. A time selector - this is used to select the simulation time for which the traffic events are to be created. The user specifies an hour (1-12), a minute(0-59), and seconds (0 or 30). A user interface such as the Time Selector widget used in the Simulation Manager would be best.
2. A color selector - a drop down box with three color choices: green, yellow, and red.

Use Case

System: Displays the CPTMS highway network with all dots green.
System: Clears the traffic events file.
User: Selects 0:01:00 in the time selector.
User: Selects Yellow in the color selector.
User: Clicks on VDS "55 N 6.35 @ MAIN"
System: Changes the above dot to Yellow.  Changes dots further along 55 N to white, and all other dots on the map to black.
User: Clicks on VDS "55 N 6.94 @ MCARTHUR"
System: Changes all the dots between these two points to Yellow.   Restores all other dots on highway to their current color.
System: Append one line to the traffic events file:
1   00:01:00  55     N         6.35     0.59    Y
User: Selects 0:01:30 in the time selector.
User: Selects Yellow in the color selector.
User: Clicks on VDS "55 N 7.16 @ MCARTHU2"
System: Changes the above dot to Yellow.  Changes dots further along 55 N to white, and all other dots on the map to black.
User: Clicks on VDS "55 N 8.12 @ DYER2"
System: Changes all the dots between these two points to Yellow.   Restores all other dots on highway to their current color.
System: Append one line to the traffic events file:
1   00:01:30  55     N         7.16     0.96    Y

User continues to select highway segments to be assigned a specified color at a specified time. These are all changes for a SINGLE incident.

When complete, the user manually edits the data file to change the "1" in the first column to the desired incident number, eg., 181.

User then repeats the process for the next incident. When all incidents have been created, user manually concatenates the files for all incidents, then sorts them by timestamp. The resulting file is ready to be used by CPTMS.