Safety

This project was built upon the Minnesota Statewide Commercial Vehicle Weight Compliance
Strategic Plan (2005) goal to preserve Minnesota’s infrastructure by minimizing damage from
overweight trucks. A primary focus of the project was building a Virtual Weigh Station “starter”
system at a reasonable cost and within a short time frame. This was accomplished by using
current Weigh in Motion (WIM) scales and applications for weight enforcement purposes. The
project began by documenting appropriate inspection areas for each WIM site. The scale data
was then processed in new ways to create performance measures for tracking progress and for
real time enforcement screening. Also, a variety of WIM controllers were demonstrated to find
competitive products suitable for Mn/DOT’s needs. Finally, the use of digital imaging and
dynamic feedback technologies were investigated as potential new tools.

Minnesota Department of Transportation

URS Corporation

Presented at the 15th World Congress on Intelligent Transport Systems, November 16-20, 2008, New York, New York

All over the world, most major roads suffer from the increasing traffic density. This results in more accidents, more vehicles involved, a larger risk for secondary accidents and long traffic jams. Today, increasing traffic volume and complexity has created a need for more optimised & improved ITS technology, highly automatic incident management systems in particular.

Facts & figures such as ‘more than 200.000 people killed each year’ and also the need for more security result in more investments into safer roads and better control of the traffic on highways in general. Today, traffic managers are looking for effective incident management because this can save countless commuter hours, gallons of fuel, and thousands of dollars. Effective incident management completely depends on fast incident detection and fast incident verification. While video detection handles both traffic data collection and automatic incident detection, its incident detection shows a high detection rate, a short time to detect, a fast incident verification and a low false alarm rate. These characteristics make video extremely useful for reaching incident management goals such as fast & effective intervention or secondary incident prevention.

The European research project RHYTHM aims to evaluate the benefits of using video for better traffic flow models and predictions of traffic jams and queue tails. This will further reduce the number of secondary casualties and also reduce the economic costs due to incident generated traffic jams. This article contains a review of the basic characteristics of effective incident management and the role played by video detection as a solid solution. Wide area video incident detection proves to be the best and most reliable detection system currently available.

Traficon n.v., Belgium

Presented at the ITS America Annual Conference and Exposition, April 26 - 28, 2004 San Antonio, Texas

Controlling traffic tunnels is a complex task which imposes serious requirements. Tunnel
safety depends largely on alerting motorists and tunnel personnel of a traffic incident in a
timely manner. Such an alert must be based on a reliable and complete monitoring of tunnel
activities. Highway tunnels are already equipped with basic video systems mainly for
supervising by tunnel stuff and guidance of emergency activities. Effective incident
management completely depends on fast incident detection and fast incident verification. Due
to the huge amount of information provided by video systems, image analysis might help
human operators to detect unexpected events and prevent dangerous situations.
This paper summarises our present study called VITUS-1. The feasibility study VITUS-1
defines a concept mainly based on digital video image analysis in order to accomplish the
following tasks: 1) automatically recognizing alarm situations in road tunnels; 2) alerting the
tunnel personnel and – if necessary – the road users; and 3) automatic storage of traffic
incident video sequences.

1ARC Seibersdorf research GmbH,
Autobahnen und Schnellstrassen-Finanzierungs-Aktien Gesellschaft (ASFiNAG)

ETM professional control GmbH

Institute for Computer Graphics and Vision - Graz University of Technology

PTV AG

ASTL

Presented at the 12th World Congress on Intelligent Transport Systems, November 6-10, 2005, San Francisco, California

We propose a hybrid ITS safety architecture that combines vehicle-to-vehicle communication and
vehicle-to-roadside sensor communication. Opposed to dedicated roadside units, which require major investments for purchase, installation and maintenance, roadside wireless sensor and networking technology represents a cost-effective solution and can leverage the deployment of the system as a whole. Among the various services of the hybrid communication system, the paper introduces accident prevention and post-accident investigation. We present a system and protocol architecture with a fully distributed concept for efficient and secure storage of sensor data. For deployment, this architecture will likely be combined with an alternative approach using dedicated road-side units as a centralized network element for communication and data storage. For the proposed system, we describe the main components (radio, networking and services, security). Finally, we describe our prototype implementation and experimental testbed featuring hardware and software platforms for vehicle on-board units and sensor nodes.

NEC Laboratories Europe

Presented at the 15th World Congress on Intelligent Transport Systems, November 16-20, 2008, New York, New York

The Roads Tunnel Safety Regulations 2007 require that traffic [in a TERN ] tunnel
maintain a travel time gap of 2 seconds; or 4 seconds for a HGV. These regulations
also require the Administrative Authority for the Tunnel to ensure that the procedure
for that tunnel's immediate closure in the event of an emergency is established.
Throughout Europe this is commonly achieved by installing Traffic Signals at the
tunnel entry portal.
This paper describes a system which integrates a number of different existing
technologies to provide a "Tunnel Occupancy Manager". It is achieved by the
application of the existing principles and technology to dynamically manage tunnel
traffic flows. When congestion is likely to occur in the tunnel the Tunnel Occupancy
Manager would start to "meter" traffic through the tunnel by firstly operating
advanced warning signs and then modulating the switching frequency of traffic lights
located near the entrance of the tunnel via a sophisticated control algorithm.

Atkins, UK

Presented at the 15th World Congress on Intelligent Transport Systems, November 16-20, 2008, New York, New York