Drivers are increasingly demanding systems for monitoring congestion and predicting their travel times. On 1 October 1997, the European AVS-TDC (Advanced Video Surveillance Time to Destination Calculation) project was begun in response to this demand. It was designed to use video detection to calculate travel time and determine queue tail position, and ran until 30 September 1998. It was partly funded by the European Commission and had five partners. The partners' practical field experience with different technologies was very important in defining user needs and evaluating results. A pilot site was selected on a stretch of the E17 motorway in Belgium, between Ghent and Antwerp. The 7.8km long section has three lanes in each carriageway, is heavily congested, and is equipped with 15 traffic-data-detection cameras. It has a parking zone, four entrances, and three exits. Real traffic data were obtained for off-site working, and allowed continuous off-site results evaluation. Several flow-monitoring methods and mathematical models were compared with the visual analysis of video images. The project demonstrated the full potential of the video-image processor (VIP) detector, which it showed to be competitive with other detection technologies, and was integrated within total traffic-data handling.
Abstract