Virtual Laboratory: Alternative Approach to Urban Transportation Systems Planning Laboratory

The significant advancement of internet technology has made it possible for users to access laboratories located at distant places with the help of a virtual platform. This paper presents Urban Transportation Systems Planning Virtual laboratory, one such platform using internet technology, where users can access the experiments based on Urban Transportation System Planning (UTSP) course. UTSP is one of the important courses for a master’s degree in Transportation Engineering, and is also an elective course for undergraduates at many universities. Implementation of the problems covered under this course is quite computationally intensive and the experiments are usually performed using commercial tools like TransCAD or Cube Voyager. These tools are expensive and are not affordable by most engineering colleges in India. This laboratory aims to provide users with an interactive graphical user interface for performing and evaluating the experiments in the field of Transportation Demand Modeling. To provide such an interactive and realistic graphical user interface for virtual environment, it has been designed using freely available software platforms such as JRE 1.7, Apache, PHP and MySQL. The scalability and interactivity of this laboratory are realized using client server architecture where user only needs simple java-enabled browser to access the laboratory located at a different location. Feedbacks and Self evaluation reports were collected from 133 users out of 204 registered users to assess the goodness of the quality of learning imparted by the lab to its users and 95% of users found the quality of UTSP Virtual laboratory above average.

• 
• Supplemental Notes:
  • This paper was sponsored by TRB committee ABG20 Transportation Education and Training.
• Corporate Authors:

  Transportation Research Board

  500 Fifth Street, NW
  Washington, DC  United States  20001
• Authors:
  • Sharma, Ritesh
  • Jadhav, Shital S
  • Tripathy, Debabrata
  • Sardar, Harshala V
  • Patil, Gopal R
• Conference:
  • Transportation Research Board 93rd Annual Meeting
  • Location: Washington DC
  • Date: 2014-1-12 to 2014-1-16
• Date: 2014

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Digital/other
• Features: Figures; References;
• Pagination: 16p
• Monograph Title: TRB 93rd Annual Meeting Compendium of Papers

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Distance learning; Education and training methods; Transportation engineering; Travel demand; Universities and colleges; Urban transportation; User interfaces (Computer science); Virtual reality
• Geographic Terms: India
• Subject Areas: Data and Information Technology; Education and Training; Planning and Forecasting; Transportation (General); I10: Economics and Administration;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01518567
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: 14-5619
• Files: PRP, TRIS, TRB, ATRI
• Created Date: Mar 20 2014 1:39PM