4 minute read
Simpler management
How intelligent traffic solutions are evolving to accommodate new technological advances
Words | Manuel Milli, Swarco, Austria
In the future, the range of traffic modes will become more diverse – bicycles, pedestrians, public transport and highly automated vehicles are all going to play a major role and will need tailored information and traffic management approaches. By 2020 nearly 20 billion IoT-enabled devices will generate massive amounts of data that can be used to predict and react on traffic and mobility events.
Traditional traffic detection and sensing technologies can be complemented by data from vehicles and mobile devices. Highly automated and connected vehicles set new quality standards in infrastructure and its maintenance, paving the way for new traffic control schemes. Swarco’s TMaaS (Traffic Management as a Service) approach uses a combination of leading-edge technologies that integrate with the operational infrastructure and are prepared to cope with these major social and technological trends.
TMaaS is a new concept that applies the latest IT ideas and technology to traffic management infrastructure, with a wide range of application modules managed by experts. It is based on flexible deployment options tailored to individual customer requirements. Using browser-based interfaces with easy workflows, the solution is suited to the modern work environment where access to traffic management is often needed away from traditional control rooms.
Essential traffic controlling tools
Traffic management systems are essential tools, supporting city and road managers to efficiently operate their networks and manage changing traffic situations.
The conventional approach required software and hardware installed at the customer premises and implies high levels of IT engagement and competence at the client side. All this translates into considerable procurements costs and initial investment. Moreover most agencies use only a subset of the available features, meaning high training costs with limited return and the need for additional support contracts. Increasingly, only large agencies with large numbers of qualified staff can afford and fully benefit from the advantages of modern traffic management systems.
Swarco has developed this modern approach to overcome these issues, building directly on experience gained from existing customer deployments and feedback.
TMaaS is offered as cloud-based infrastructure to provide a completely scalable solution, including full redundancy and standby options for complete peace of mind and continuous operation. Furthermore, web technologies allow system monitoring to be easily implemented and shared with all stakeholders for maximum engagement.
More than just a cheaper alternative
TMaaS is not only a valid and cost-efficient alternative to conventional traffic management, but it also provides a number of additional benefits: Every city has its own requirements, which need different tools to be efficiently managed. Through TMaaS, customers will have access to several features and software modules and will be able to choose those that are relevant to their specific requirements.
The Strategy Manager, for instance, is a tool expressly designed to operate in the framework of integrated road traffic environments, where it provides strategic level coordination among one or more ITS applications deployed to reach mobility management goals. The tool reacts to traffic situations and forecasts in a structured and dynamic way, in order to prevent traffic anomalies or recover from anomalies quickly. The growth of the system in terms of installed equipment or features will not be a problem as TMaaS cloud infrastructure provides a completely scalable solution.
The TMaaS approach reduces overall cost and almost eliminates IT needs on the customer side with increasing security. The system will always be up-to-date and upgrades are managed on a service basis. The system can support different providers
and follows an open approach to external suppliers. It very much increases portability and offers a perfect solution for employees who are increasingly on the move, with anytime, anywhere availability.
Moving from reactive to proactive mindset
TMaaS fully supports equipment monitoring and system maintenance, providing all the data to move from a reactive to a proactive approach, helping to optimize physical presence on-site, as well as spare-part management.
The City Dashboard is a tool expressly designed to turn huge amounts of data from heterogeneous sources (road network, ITS devices, IoT, etc) into actionable insights that help users in taking the proper actions. It provides a set of fully customizable widgets to aggregate data, present it and generate reports in different formats to meet specific monitoring and analysis needs. This makes the City Dashboard an indispensable business tool. The underlying Data Warehouse is designed to accommodate huge amounts of data from heterogeneous sources into harmonized data structures and data access interfaces in combination with data pre-processing solutions provide the ideal environment for advanced data analytics.
This concept enables Swarco to provide TMaaS to a customer who today does not operate a traffic control system or does not have staff for dynamic traffic management. If needed, Swarco can also provide operational traffic management services as well as management and maintenance of equipment and even operational incident management.
The system design has been kept open to allow integration of third-party services and solutions. Swarco has teamed up with a number of partners who contribute with their products to enhance the system and provide additional features. Highly accurate traffic information based on floating car data and environmental data are two examples that can be used seamlessly throughout the TMaaS. n
