Development of Data Warehouse and Applications for Continuous Vehicle Class and Weigh-in-Motion Data

Abstract

Presently, the Office of Transportation Data & Analysis (TDA) at the Minnesota Department of Transportation (Mn/DOT) manages 29 Vehicle Classification (VC) sites and 12 Weigh-in-Motion (WIM) sites installed on various Minnesota roadways. The data is collected 24/7 from all sites, resulting in a large amount of data. The total amount of data is expected to substantially grow with time due to the continuous accumulation of data from the present sites and future expansion of sites. Therefore, there is an urgent need to develop an efficient data management strategy for dealing with the present needs and future growth of this data. The solution proposed in this research project is to develop a centralized data warehouse from which all applications can acquire the data. The objective of this project was to develop software for creating a VC/WIM data warehouse and example applications that utilize it. This project was successfully completed by developing the software necessary to build the VC/WIM data warehouse and the application software packages that utilize the data. The main contribution of this project is that it provides a single access point for querying all of the Mn/DOT’s WIM and VC data, from which many more applications can be developed without concerns of proprietary binary formats.