Traffic & Congestion Management – UTMC

The Challenge

DSRC was approached by a major software development company in UK to support with the development of a Traffic Management platform that aids the roads police in UK to monitor, control and manage the traffic flow. The platform should also be able to provide real time information from various hardware and devices installed on the roads to an Admin control portal. The requirements also include developing and integrating a GPS system that provides the real time access to the location and provide information regarding parking spaces in various parts of the city. The proposed system should need to comply with various regulations and standards related to traffic management, data protection, and privacy.

The foremast challenge was to engage the team with relevant industry knowledge and provide inputs regarding various regulatory compliances related to road transportation. Integrating multiple systems and technologies, such as traffic signals, CCTV cameras, and data networks, required a high degree of technical expertise and coordination. The system poses integration challenges to existing workflows and processes.

The Opportunity

DSRC took the project as an opportunity to penetrate the Intelligent Transport Management domain and implementation of various product suites provides experience and expertise to different sub branches with in the domain

The Approach & Solution

DSRC’s development team initiated the engagement by transitioning the knowledge from the client’s subject experts, extracting project documentation, and engaging resources with relevant industry experience. DSRC team swiftly standardized the estimation models, project plans, milestones, release management, test artifacts, deployment and delivery model and induction of the team members in to the project, thus laying a firm foundation on which to base the OAT(Operation Acceptance Testing), UAT(User Acceptance Testing) and SAT(System Acceptance Testing) operating model of the client.

Integration specialists were formed to receive data from various devices like scoots, CCTV cameras, detectors, speed gun and more. The integration team also provided integration support of software suite to the main platform like Google and Bing Maps, parking space management software and journey time engines.

The team parallelly conducted research & Development to integrate with new traffic devices that are coming in as well as analyzing on the next generation products.

The UTMC compliant common database provides an open standard data store to collect and disseminate traffic and transport information from existing or new UTMC sub systems. It also provides Traffic Managers with the ability to develop better, integrated traffic and transport control strategies in line with current national and local transport policies. The same sets of data stored are viewed by the public portal with restricted usage. There are several products and options available depending on the network and traffic management needs.

Few products built in the suite are as follows, UTMC core product, Strategy Manager for setting strategies to trigger alerts for the Traffic Managers, Journey Time Engine to calculate the journey time of a route and help to find the shortest route, Adaptors to integrate heterogeneous systems to the intelligent transport system and to receive and re-route the data feed to database. The core product is interfaced with the CCTV cameras, ANPR (Automatic Number Plate Recorded) Bluetooth and VMS (Variable Message Service) to monitor and control the live traffic.

The public portal helps the public to view the traffic situations to plan their travel and Car park occupancies are provided by the portal for the users. Variable Message Sign Boards are dynamically fed with messages for the road users.

The system has been deployed in 25 counties published via Umbraco. The Umbraco Content Management Server helps the portal administering users to easily edit and change the required content with no technical knowledge. The system provides multilingual support for different languages, and this has been achieved by Umbraco Multilingual support feature. A User Control was developed as a plug-in for Umbraco for site searches. Created master templates using Umbraco for normal mode and mobile mode views and extensively used nested templates. Extensively used CSS embedded in Umbraco, .Net Custom Control, .Net User control, XSLT for various Umbraco Controls and libraries. RSS feeds have been published using Umbraco.