Don Watson was awarded a 2015 Dwight D. Eisenhower Graduate Fellowship. This prestigious fellowship is given to outstanding students in the field of transportation. Watson is specializing in traffic operations and simulation of two-lane highways.
“The Eisenhower Graduate Fellowship has enhanced my education by reducing the financial burden of school and travel to conferences,” Watson said. “It has also connected me to bright students who are performing innovative research in transportation. It’s amazing to see how much of an impact this program has on the upcoming generation of transportation engineers.”
Watson is currently in his fourth year of the doctoral program and is working on an NCHRP-17-65 project titled “Improved Analysis of Two-Lane Highway Capacity and Operational Performance”. His task in this project is to evaluate current methods for incorporating the effect of trucks in two-lane highway operational analyses. Watson explains that the Highway Capacity Manual (HCM) currently uses passenger car equivalent (PCE) values to account for the effect of trucks, which has been subject of criticism, due to PCEs not being sensitive enough to the characteristics of truck performance and interactions with geometry. Watson says the issue can be even more profound on two-lane highways, where geometric alignments can be widely varying. Truck performance characteristics have improved a lot since the last update to the HCM two-lane highway analysis methodology, so new PCE values based on current truck performance are needed.
Watson will use both field and simulation data to compare the HCM PCE approach to other alternatives used to capture the effect of trucks. He will utilize two simulation tools to generate the simulation data—TransModeler and SwashSim. TransModeler is a commercial simulation tool maintained and distributed by Caliper Corporation and SwashSim is a custom tool developed and maintained by Scott Wasburn, P.E., Ph.D., an associate professor of transportation at the UFTI, who is also Watson’s doctoral adviser. SwashSim has the ability to model individual vehicle characteristics and dynamics in great detail and is able to account for the effects of roadway design features on vehicle performance with more accuracy than other simulation tools. Currently, Watson is assisting Washburn incorporate the vehicle movement logic specific to two-lane highway operations (for example, passing in the oncoming lane) in SwashSim.
After graduation, Watson plans to pursue a career in academia where he can teach and conduct research in the transportation field.