The Highways Agency (HA) began a pilot scheme in September 2006 to investigate the benefits of Active Traffic Management (ATM) on the M42. One aspect of this work involves the opening of the hard shoulder as a running lane at peak periods. Given the success of this pilot and the motivation to improve journey times throughout the network, the HA now plans to roll-out similar schemes as part of its Managed Motorway Program to a number of newlocations. In order to facilitate this, a system of monitoring the hard shoulder is required. It is especially important that operators are aware of any stationary vehicle, pedestrian or significant debris on the hard shoulder prior to opening it for use as a running lane. In the current pilot this has been achieved by manual observation of CCTV cameras however in the future it is envisaged that the efficiency of this process can be improved with the aid of a hard shoulder monitoring system. With this requirement in mind, the HA has been engaged in a number of research activities related to assessing both detector technologies and the systems and algorithmsrequired to make best use of these. A hard shoulder detection system, entitled HASMOS, is described here which encapsulates a range of research performed by the HA in terms of hard shoulder event detection algorithms, detector data pre-processing and detector interfacing. In this paper the architecture and algorithms which make up HASMOS are described. Results are also presented from a recent radar based trial on the M42 conducted by WSP ITS on behalf of the Highways Agency. Five scanning FMCW radars were deployed for this work and the performance of HASMOS monitored over a period of two months.
Abstract