On Wednesday 10/7/2026 the TRACER team presented our Preliminary Design Report at the McTrans Center on UF’s East Campus. Attendees included our project liaisons Fabio Sasahara and Raul Pineda-Mendez, McTrans director Bob Aghdashi, and McTrans employees Melissa Ginoza, Shen Dong, Ehsan Amini, and Samantha Taningco. The attendees were excited to see our progress on the Automated Road Segmentation for Highway Capacity Analysis and our ideas for potential solutions or features.

Having a larger McTrans audience than our typical weekly meetings provided great insight into other departments of the company and how their ideas could positively influence our project. We received great feedback regarding potential sources of data for our goals and some challenges or limitations we may face that have not yet been considered. Particularly, Shen Dong from the McTrans software team provided great tips and questions for us to consider, as our project will be heavily software-based and the TRACER team is entirely comprised of Computer Science majors.

The TRACER team is making good progress, and this experience was very positive for both the team and for the McTrans Center. In the upcoming weeks we will use the valuable feedback given to us to further refine our project plan.

This week we drafted up our project’s preliminary design architecture, which includes the above figure modeling a Pipe-and-Filter architecture, which lays out the planned data flow of our solution at a high level from input to output. This includes the compilation of data from several sources, its normalization, processing, and post-processing/validation to ultimately form the expected output. Data validation is an integral aspect of our project. After the data is sent through the segmentation engine, there needs to be a verification system to determine the validity and accuracy of each determination. Manually auditing each segment is precisely the task we’re trying to automate, so a process to verify the accuracy of each output is a high-priority challenge we will face during development.

Our team also presented at the peer review event for Preliminary Design Report presentations. This event was a great experience, allowing us to receive feedback on our presentation’s content, format and our team’s individual presentation style. We will use this feedback to further refine the Preliminary Design Report as we prepare for our official presentation at the McTrans Center next week.

On Saturday 9/19, two TRACER members Kevin and Roop completed the Six Sigma workshop hosted by presenters Linda Linnus and Doreen Avafor of Florida Power and Light (FPL). In the workshop, we learned effective tips and strategies for project and process management within a team. Through mock car dealership simulations, our team members learned concept development strategies, root cause analysis, and process waste detection to optimize a project’s efficiency and effectiveness.

Our team has continued its progress in the self-paced course provided by McTrans to familiarize ourselves with the Highway Capacity Manual (HCM) to improve our understanding of freeway segmentation. The absence of a civil engineer or industrial and systems engineer on our student team presents a challenge of expertise on freeway segmentation, but with assistance from liaisons Dr. Raul Pineda-Mendez and Dr. Fabio Sasahara, and the McTrans self-paced HCM course, TRACER is approaching the expertise level required for the project.

Last Friday, 9/11/2026, team TRACER had our first meeting with our project liaisons Dr. Raul Pineda-Mendez and Dr. Fabio Sasahara, as well as the McTrans Center director Dr. Bob Aghdashi. Because the McTrans Center is located on UF’s East Campus, we have the opportunity of meeting in-person at the McTrans Center every Friday morning. Our sponsor was very welcoming and we are excited to start working with them!

This week we’ve been exploring different types of data and datasets we may work with to perform freeway segmentation. A valuable resource we will explore further is LRS (Linear Referencing System) data that each U.S. state’s department of transportation is required to maintain, which contains information relevant to our goal such as mile marker locations of different freeway characteristics and road geometries. Our next steps in evaluating the usefulness of these datasets include determining how consistent the data structures are state-to-state and comparing the data to HCM (Highway Capacity Manual) criteria to extrapolate useful data points.

Our team is working with the McTrans Center to develop a solution capable of automating the highway segmentation process in accordance with the Highway Capacity Manual (HCM) for the purpose of performing highway capacity analysis. The solution will be capable of automated freeway segmentation in all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia.

TRACER (Traffic Roadway Automation for Corridor Extraction and Recognition) is comprised of 6 computer science students, assisted by liaisons Dr. Raul Pineda-Mendez and Dr. Fabio Sasahara, and coached by Dr. Zhe Jiang.