Graphic Traffic Events Creator - User Guide

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 initial display shows two controls:

1. A time selector - Displays the simulation time for which the traffic events are to be created. It starts at zero and automatically increments by 30 second intervals. The user may input a time by specifying an hour (1-12), a minute(0-59), and seconds (0-59). Once a time has been specified, it will automatically increment by 30 seconds.
2. A color selector - three color buttons: green, yellow, and red.

Use Case

System: Displays the CPTMS highway network with Yellow button selected and time zero.
User: Clicks on VDS "55 N 6.35 @ MAIN"
System: The selected dot changes to White. Dots further along 55 N also become white.
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: Calculates the distance between the two dots (in this case, 0.59 miles) 
and append one line to the traffic events file:
101   00:00:00  55     N         6.35     0.590    Y
System: Automatically advance the time selector by 30 seconds to 0:01:30.  
User: Clicks on VDS "55 N 7.16 @ MCARTHU2"
System: Changes the above dot to White.  Changes dots further along 55 N to white.
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:
101   00:00:30  55     N         7.16     0.960    Y
User: Enters "00:05:00" in the time box.
User: Clicks the Red button.
User: Clicks on VDS "405 N 7.07 @ JAMBOREE2"
System: Changes the above dot to White.  Changes dots further along 405 N to white.
User: Clicks on VDS "405 N 9.46 @ BRISTOL 1"
System: Append one line to the traffic events file:
101   00:05:00	405	N	7.07	2.390	R   

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 "101" 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.

Note the system does very little error checking. It doesn't not verify that a manually entered time is subsequent to the current time and if a prior time is entered the sequence of events in the output file will be out of order. There is no validation for time format. If an invalid time is entered the output will shows "Invalid Date" instead of a time.

The system does have one feature that prevent errors:  Once the first dot is selected, only a white dot may be chosen for the second dot.