Papers by Timothy Colling
Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ASPRS) and the ASPRS Mid-South Region, I would like to welcome... more Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ASPRS) and the ASPRS Mid-South Region, I would like to welcome you to Louisville, home of the Kentucky Derby, and to this year's ASPRS Annual Conference, whose theme is "Geospatial Power in Our Pockets" and co-located with the Joint Agency Commercial Imagery Evaluation (JACIE) Workshop. I would like to take this opportunity to thank the Technical Program Co-Chairs Drs. Marguerite Madden and Thomas Jordan, for developing a fantastic technical program, which has some new style sessions, such as LIGHTNING talks, Hot Topics, Web and Special Sessions/Panels, to name the few, and has hundreds of presentations including Emerging Technologies, Geospatial Power in Our Pockets, Business & Management for the Geospatial Professional, Core Technologies, Interactive Sessions and several application topics. I would like to also thank the Planning/Organizing Committee, student volunteers, exhibitors, professionals, presenters, sponsors, and the Mid-South Region, which contributed generously to the Student Volunteer Program, for making this conference a success. Several workshops have been offered on Sunday, March the 23 rd and Monday, the 24 th. The ASPRS committee meetings have been scheduled for those days as well. Please feel free to attend some of the events if you could. We will have several social events at the Annual Conference. The Welcome Reception will be held at the Kentucky Derby Museum, next to Churchill Downs, capturing the traditions of the Kentucky Derby, on Monday the 24 th between 6:00 PM and 9:00 PM. Please come and join us to "break the ice" at this wonderful event, which is included with most registrations. Bus transportation will be on a continuous basis from the Galt House Hotel to the Kentucky Derby Museum beginning at 5:30 PM until 9:00 PM. Also, please make every effort to attend the Exhibitors Reception, to be held on Tuesday, March the 25 th from 5:30 PM to 7:00 PM, to discuss cutting edge technologies with exhibitors in a relaxed environment and to network with professionals. The JACIE/ASPRS Poster Reception & Live Bluegrass music, to be played by ASPRS Members, will be held by the Poster area, directly across from the Exhibit Hall on Wednesday, March the 26 th from 5:00 PM to 6:00 PM. Another event, a special continental breakfast, including Prize Drawing for the winners of the Exhibit Hall Passport Contest, will be held in the Exhibit Hall on Thursday, March the 27 th from 8:00 AM until 8:45 AM. We will also have a student event to connect students looking for jobs in geospatial industry and employers looking to hire on Thursday March 27 th from 9:00AM until 10:30AM. Also, your Student Advisory Council (SAC) Networking Coordinator will arrange social gatherings after each of the day's conference activities.
This data set describes barrier attributes and project costs for all dams and road-crossings in t... more This data set describes barrier attributes and project costs for all dams and road-crossings in the Saginaw River, Michigan, USA
A hallmark of industrialization is the construction of dams for water management and roads for tr... more A hallmark of industrialization is the construction of dams for water management and roads for transportation, leading to fragmentation of aquatic ecosystems. Many nations are striving to address both maintenance backlogs and mitigation of environmental impacts as their infrastructure ages. Here, we test whether accounting for road repair needs could offer opportunities to boost conservation efficiency by piggybacking connectivity restoration projects on infrastructure maintenance. Using optimization models to align fish passage restoration sites with likely road repair priorities, we find potential increases in conservation return-on-investment ranging from 17% to 25%. Importantly, these gains occur without compromising infrastructure or conservation priorities; simply communicating openly about objectives and candidate sites enables greater accomplishment at current funding levels. Society embraces both reliable roads and thriving fisheries, so overcoming this coordination challenge should be feasible. Given deferred maintenance crises for many types of infrastructure, there could be widespread opportunities to enhance the cost-effectiveness of conservation investments by coordinating with infrastructure renewal efforts
To make an impact on reducing the number of crashes on our country’s roads, most agree that atten... more To make an impact on reducing the number of crashes on our country’s roads, most agree that attention must be paid to the local road system. Ironically when we look across the country to see who has the necessary tools and resources to effectively conduct traffic safety analysis, the answer is typically “everyone BUT local agencies.” This paper presents a case study of an initiative to provide local agencies in Michigan with the tools and resources needed to effectively conduct traffic safety analysis. Michigan has taken a “teach them to fish” approach to dealing with crashes on local agency roads. That is: provide access to the data, provide access to the tools to efficiently analyze the data, and provide training and support on how to conduct the necessary analysis. Key to this initiative is RoadSoft GIS. Developed and supported by Michigan Tech University with funding support from the Michigan Department of Transportation, this system is available to Michigan’s local agencies at ...
The Bridge Design System (BDS) is an in-house software program developed by the Michigan Departme... more The Bridge Design System (BDS) is an in-house software program developed by the Michigan Department of Transportation's (MDOT) Bridge Design Unit. The BDS designs bridges according to the required specifications, and outputs corresponding design drawings and calculations. It has been the primary design tool for MDOT's bridges over the last several decades. Because of the BDS's longevity of use and development, MDOT has experienced a high level of comfort, familiarity, and efficiency with it. However, components of the BDS have been added and removed over the years, and little associated documentation exists today. The code itself has seen nearly 60 years of evolution in the Fortran programming language. Migration to another software system is likely to require significant changes to MDOT business processes and may require multiple software systems rather than the unified design system of the BDS. Also, long-term viability of the BDS would require documentation of the existing architecture and operation of the system as well as development of a plan for future compatibility and functionality of the software. Therefore, the Center for Technology & Training at Michigan Tech was contracted to document, analyze and propose modernization options for the BDS. This report describes the tools used to conduct this assessment and the results of this task. 17. Key Words 18. Distribution Statement No restrictions. This document is available to the public through the Michigan Department of Transportation. 19. Security Classif. (of this report) Unclassified 20. Security Classif.
The Kirkpatrick training assessment model is the prime method of assessing the impact of training... more The Kirkpatrick training assessment model is the prime method of assessing the impact of training events. This method was primarily developed for execution in a corporate environment and researchers may encounter difficulty employing it to assess the impact of non-compulsory technology transfer events. Complications of applying the Kirkpatrick method in these types of events can result from the following for factors: 1) the inability to predict likely behavior changes in participants, 2) the widely varying and sometimes unknown backgrounds of participants, 3) the lack of a control group for learning assessment tests 4) unavailability of participants to be observed for behavior changes. This paper discusses a number of techniques that have been developed and have undergone field trials to supplement the Kirkpatrick assessment method and overcome these complications for non-compulsory technology transfer events. The techniques include; using personal information of participants to pro...
Rural roadway safety is an important issue for communities throughout the country and presents a ... more Rural roadway safety is an important issue for communities throughout the country and presents a challenge for state, local, and Tribal agencies. The Improving Safety on Rural Local and Tribal Roads – Safety Toolkit was created to help rural local and Tribal roadway safety practitioners address these challenges. The Safety Toolkit provides a step-by-step process to assist local agency and Tribal practitioners in completing traffic safety analyses, identify safety issues, countermeasures to address them, and an implementation process. Each step in the Toolkit contains a set of tools, examples, and links to resources appropriate to the needs of safety practitioners. The report presents a seven-step safety analysis process based on a similar process developed in the Highway Safety Manual. The seven steps are: compile data; conduct network screening; select sites for investigation; diagnose site conditions and identify countermeasures; prioritize countermeasures for implementation; impl...
Elected officials and agency decision-makers as well as the general public often exacerbate the t... more Elected officials and agency decision-makers as well as the general public often exacerbate the traffic safety problems that they were working to solve. In some cases, the lack of technical understanding by the non-engineering community negates solutions developed by an engineering professional. In other cases technically competent recommendations are willfully disregarded by the non-engineering community. Both of these situations contribute to the detriment of traffic safety. Traffic safety is also hampered by the fact that many local agencies, although they have civil engineering support, do not have traffic engineering expertise. This quandary plagues many technical fields and can be seen as a failure of the profession to view education of the non-engineering community and its engineering professionals as a core requirement of accomplishing its respective goals. Nowhere is the result of this failure to educate more obvious and dramatic than in the field of traffic safety. This pa...
Ecological applications : a publication of the Ecological Society of America, Jan 9, 2018
A hallmark of industrialization is the construction of dams for water management and roads for tr... more A hallmark of industrialization is the construction of dams for water management and roads for transportation, leading to fragmentation of aquatic ecosystems. Many nations are striving to address both maintenance backlogs and mitigation of environmental impacts as their infrastructure ages. Here, we test whether accounting for road repair needs could offer opportunities to boost conservation efficiency by piggybacking connectivity restoration projects on infrastructure maintenance. Using optimization models to align fish passage restoration sites with likely road repair priorities, we find potential increases in conservation return-on-investment ranging from 17% to 25%. Importantly, these gains occur without compromising infrastructure or conservation priorities; simply communicating openly about objectives and candidate sites enables greater accomplishment at current funding levels. Society embraces both reliable roads and thriving fisheries, so overcoming this coordination challen...
2013 International Conference on Unmanned Aircraft Systems (ICUAS), 2013
ABSTRACT The need of local governments and transportation agencies to periodically asses the cond... more ABSTRACT The need of local governments and transportation agencies to periodically asses the condition of unpaved roads in a cost-effective manner with rapid response times has lead to interest in the use of UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) and remote sensing technologies. Currently these assessments are done through visual inspections with agency staff making occasional spot measurements. An unpaved road assessment system was developed to address these issues while at the same time providing a more accurate means of characterizing distresses and determining the roads condition for inspectors. This system uses a single-rotor UAV with a Digital Single-lens Reflex (DSLR) camera to capture overlapping imagery of unpaved roads. The UAV is equipped with a full combination GPS plus IMU (Inertial Measurement Unit) that allows it to fly predetermined waypoints with great stability while at the same time allowing the pilot the ability to take over at any time. Collected imagery is analyzed to locate road distresses. The imagery is run through a Structure From Motion (SfM) algorithm that generates a 3D model of the road surface from which additional condition information can be characterized. This system is easily transported and rapidly deployable to sections of unpaved roads for assessment.
This paper is the result of a two studies. Validation of RoadSoft GIS Deterioration and Strategy ... more This paper is the result of a two studies. Validation of RoadSoft GIS Deterioration and Strategy Evaluation Models examined the assumptions, validity and confidence of the Gompertz and the Logistic growth models currently used for deterioration and strategy analysis in the RoadSoft® software developed at Michigan Technological University. The models were first introduced to pavement management analysis in the 1990's. This study has shown that the original models used did not completely satisfy the assumptions made during their development, even though when applied to pavement management analysis acceptable results were achieved. Modifications to the models however, can satisfy the original assumptions and improve results. Through the use of road condition data collected by local agencies in Michigan, it is shown that errors in prediction are smaller when using the modified models.
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Papers by Timothy Colling