ACEC NY: Diamond Award for Engineering Excellence
Date Awarded: Saturday, Apr 6th, 2013

Over 600 engineers and clients gathered in the Grand Ballroom of the Waldorf Astoria to celebrate Engineering Excellence on April 6th, 2013. At the gala, a prestigious Diamond Award was presented to the team consisting of KLD Engineering, P.C. and JHK Engineering, P.C. The Award was presented by the American Council of Engineering Companies (ACEC) NY Chapter to both companies regarding work done for NYCDOT involving Active Traffic Management through Adaptive Signal Control in Midtown Manhattan.

To goal of the project, titled Midtown in Motion (MIM), was to enhance multimodal mobility in the congested grid network of Midtown Manhattan, by implementing a set of signal based congestion management and demand regulation strategies as well as adaptive signal control at critical intersections. A sophisticated real-time decision support system was developed to meet the project goals. This system capitalizes on NYCDOT’s investment in upgrading the ITS architecture including next generation of controllers/communication. JHK Engineering, P.C. was the system integrator and KLD developed the algorithms, the control modules, and the user interface. NYCDOT was itself an integral part of the project team, providing guidance, review, and participatingin the design.

The active traffic management strategies developed for this project are innovative in their use of signal plans for traffic management, large-scale ETC travel times, and utilization of new congestion measures based on flow and occupancy. An extensive analysis of large scale data sets was conducted in order to assess system efficacy. Initial results show that travel speeds have increased by approximately 10% within the study area. The work was done under NYCDOT Engineering Services Agreements.