Development of an XML-Based Specification for Traffic Model Data Exchange

Abstract

The proliferation of traffic software programs on the market has resulted in many very specialized programs, intended to analyze one or two specific items within a transportation network. Consequently, traffic engineers use multiple programs on a single project, which ironically has resulted in new inefficiency for the traffic engineer. Most of these programs deal with the same core set of data, for example, physical roadway characteristics, traffic demand levels, and traffic control variables. However, most of these programs have their own formats for saving data files. Therefore, these programs cannot share information directly or communicate with each other because of incompatible data formats. Thus, the traffic engineer is faced with manually reentering common data from one program into another. In addition to inefficiency, this also creates additional opportunities for data entry errors. XML is catching on rapidly as a means for exchanging data between two systems or users who deal with the same data but in different formats. Specific vocabularies have been developed for statistics, mathematics, chemistry, and many other disciplines. The traffic model markup language (TMML) is introduced as a resource for traffic model data representation, storage, rendering, and exchange. TMML structure and vocabulary are described, and examples of their use are presented.