Managing increased (road) traffic has the focus of the Dutch Ministry of Transport, Public Works and Water Management for years. The measures taken to control traffic flow and to minimise the number of traffic jams more and more rely on advanced monitoring and control systems (traffic management systems). These systems traditionally were specified by the Ministry and designed and realised by industrial parties. For years this has been possible because the needed traffic management systems were small, local and independent. Nowadays (and certainly in the future) traffic problems are not local phenomena and the control will need country wide infrastructural decisions, guided by a country-wide control strategy. Such a strategy will have to be supported by an integral, uniform set of traffic management tools. To be able to control the tender for a uniform set of tools, a test centre for traffic management systems has been founded. This test centre will contain all the relevant systems in a normal traffic control centre (TCC) and data networks, such that new applications can be added and tested within this 'operational' environment. The organisational and technical details of the implementation of this test centre are described. Within 18 months, a working environment that acts as an effective filter between development projects and IT-service management in operational traffic control centres was achieved. For the covering abstract see ITRD E114174.
Abstract