Digitize Beyond eTickets

With the Federal Highway Administration’s (FHWA’s) Every Day Counts eTicketing initiative, contractors, suppliers and departments of transportation (DOTs) across the country were introduced at a broad scale to technology in a way our industry hadn’t seen before. In digitizing material tickets, we have made work zones safer, have made information easier to track down, have made payment quicker and have freed up space in our construction trailers, but our work is not complete. As eTicketing matures and becomes more standardized, the onus falls upon all of us to seize the momentum that was created and continue to advance digital construction.

HaulHub’s EDOT shows the status of equipment and material in the field to match the digital systems.

At the Delaware Department of Transportation (DelDOT), we have taken that step, and are incrementally working toward our goal of a completely connected work zone. A work zone that doesn’t just provide an electronic version of a paper ticket, but one where the equipment itself provides estimated quantities, reports on quality control metrics, reports its emissions for inclusion in Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs), provides information for asset management, and most importantly, provides its status to the traveling public to make the work zone itself even safer.

This screenshot shows the work zone on the Waze app, showing when workers are present in the work zone.

Real-World Connection

This screenshot shows the work zone within the EDOT app when transmitting.

In fall 2023, DelDOT and its partners, Greggo & Ferrara Inc. (G&F), HaulHub Technologies and iCone Products, completed two trials of a connected work zone. G&F, the contractor and supplier, volunteered to connect its Caterpillar paver and Hamm rollers, as well as iCone’s Temporary Traffic Control devices, to HaulHub’s EDOT portal for two separate weekend partial road closures. In doing so, we collected some of the first information on what we hope will become a standard practice across the industry.

Regarding the smart work zone aspect, many DOT projects can have multiple locations under a single contract, so having just the eTicket information is not sufficient to determine what location may be active on a given day. Recognizing this was one of the impetuses to connect the contractor’s equipment to HaulHub’s portal. In doing so, we gained the GPS location of the equipment and knew exactly which work zone on that multi-location project was active. We then harnessed this “active” status and provided it to Waze in a dynamic manner, giving Waze reliable information that workers were present in the work zone. Waze, in turn, was able to broadcast that information to its users.

To use the equipment’s GPS data, we first needed to define the work zone within HaulHub’s EDOT app. This, in turn, created a geofence for the contractor’s connected equipment to broadcast as active.

While the work zone definition is currently an intuitive process, it is still entirely manual.  However, we are investigating ways to get the work zones defined automatically based upon the digital plan information, and our own publicly available linear reference system, eliminating the need for multiple points and further reducing the burden on the inspection staff.

Real-World Duration

Creating and activating a work zone is not the only consideration when it comes to traffic safety implementation. We must also consider the deactivation of the work zone notification, for both the planned duration and unplanned events such as weather interruptions.

In fact, on our second trial weekend, we experienced a weather interruption.

At this early stage in our trial, the work zone deactivation within Waze was operating based upon a planned duration. With the weather interruption, the team had to manually deactivate the work zone. Subsequently, HaulHub made quick adjustments within the platform to introduce automation into the deactivation of the work zone based upon both the equipment status and eTickets.

While DelDOT’s own traffic notification showed the site as still active, the equipment was no longer operating, and material was no longer being shipped. By all accounts, it was clear in the portal that the site was no longer active, but DelDOT’s current process is dependent on a manual process with multiple layers. With a connected work zone, we are one step closer to harnessing available information to automatically prompt staff to deactivate the public notification, which doesn’t just aid traffic flows, but also improves trust in work zone notifications.

This screenshot shows the work zone boundary within the EDOT app.

Real-World Information

While notifications to the public for active work zones are a significant focus of our early efforts, we do not intend to stop there. DelDOT has partnered with Iowa, Nebraska, Louisiana, HaulHub, Iowa State University, WSP, and WAP Consulting and was recently awarded $4 Million grant from FHWA. Collectively, we intend to use this grant to begin connecting various pieces of equipment throughout our states. Because we are only in the initial phases of this effort, we focused on simple information—where is the equipment, is the equipment operating, when is the data being sent, which is all that is relevant for a safety feed.

As our efforts become more mature, we intend to gather more equipment information like the width of the screed, the depth of the screed, the depth of the mill, the slopes, etc. This type of information can provide, at the very least, a check against calculated numbers or perhaps even replace information collected by inspection staff once we build confidence in those systems. The goal though, is to give the department another way to verify that 3,046 tons of mix were placed on DE-72 on our first trial date, or that 14,350 SY-IN of bituminous concrete were milled on our second trial date.

To this point, we have engaged with equipment manufacturers to understand what is currently available on their equipment, what sensors can be easily added to their equipment and what else we can do as we move forward. Can we add a thermal sensor on the pavers or rollers? Can we get theoretical densities off the roller? With the next version of our Connected Machinery Special Provision, DelDOT will be asking for some of those additional data points (See the Sidebar).

As we build this database of information, we will grow our efforts to start getting information on quantities directly from the equipment itself. We will have geolocation data on where that work was done to feed into our asset management systems. We can use run times to determine the A5 component of EPDs on a project-wide or material-focused basis. These are no longer theoretical goals to obtain far in the future. In many cases the information is there today; it exists. We simply need to join together and capture it in a standardized manner.

That is the goal of our project.

Personally, I feel the next five years in construction will be as transformative as the preceding 15 years, as we see various technologies finally begin to come together. From eTickets, to digital as-builts, to building information management (BIM) and beyond. Connected machinery and a connected work zone are where all these things come together. Construction is the final link in the lifecycle of information for infrastructure, and connected machinery is the key to that link. We encourage all our partners in highway construction, from equipment manufacturers to contractors to suppliers to fellow agencies, to reach out to our ADCMS team and join us in bringing these innovations to fruition.

If you’d like to read more about DelDOT’s first trial project and view the information in an interactive way, please visit https://bit.ly/AsphaltProDelDOT