DEPLOYMENT OF RFID SYSTEM ON THE U.S.-MEXICO BORDER TO MEASURE CROSSING TIMES OF COMMERCIAL VEHICLES

摘要

State and federal agencies have increasingly started to implement systems to measureinternational border crossing times as a gauge to evaluate performance of border-crossings forlong-term planning and operations purposes. By definition, crossing times of commercialvehicles is the combination of wait time in queue and the time spent for subsequent inspectionsperformed by the federal and state agencies.The U.S. Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) recently deployed Radio FrequencyIdentification (RFID) based system at one of the major land border-crossings, in El Paso, Texas.Subsequent to the success of the project, the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT)deployed similar system in Pharr, Texas and is planning to deploy similar system in Laredo, andBrownsville, Texas. The Arizona Department of Transportation (ADOT) is implementing asimilar system at Mariposa, Arizona. The overall goal of these deployments is to implementsystems that would automatically and accurately collect, archive and disseminate crossing timesfor northbound commercial vehicles.The paper describes the benefits achieved by deploying Radio Frequency Identification(RFID) system at the border-crossings. The paper also analyzes crossing times of commercialvehicles, in terms of variability, correlations with other influencing factors, temporal patterns.Histograms of individual crossing times of trucks at both border-crossings show high variability.The histograms of crossing times of trucks clearly showed that 95% of trucks take approximately100 minutes or less to cross the border and 50% of trucks require approximately 40 minutes orless to cross the border. Pearson’s correlation coefficients were used to identify the factors thatinfluence hourly average crossing times of trucks. The results show that the average crossingtime is highly correlated with time of day, number of standard lanes open, lane utilization,transponders read on the U.S. side and the mix of time of day and transponders read on the U.S.side.