The capabilities of the existing Transportation Systems Laboratory in the Department of Civil Engineering at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University are being improved to the benefit of undergraduate students enrolled in transportation engineering-related courses. The laboratory project improves existing hardware and software systems to introduce laboratory experiments in traffic engineering and airport planning and design courses, and in an introductory course in transportation engineering. The instrumentation added to the project includes off-the-roadway sensors, intersection shelf counters, a central CPU, and data acquisition hardware and software. This laboratory will be used also as a monitoring center capable of replicating some of the primary functions of an intelligent vehicle highway system.
