The motivation for developing COMPANION stems from the need to supplement existing information systems by an incident warning system with high spatial resolution and short response time at incident-prone sections of inter-urban roads. After some years of development, a nine-kilometre test site has been in operation on the A92 motorway near Munich since the beginning of 1996. In case of an incident, COMPANION displays warnings by orange or yellow flashing lights emitted through LED panels. These are mounted on posts in 50m intervals along the road. Since opening the test site COMPANION has proved to be effective both in day-to-day operations and systematic tests. To achieve full system performance the current manual system has to be extended by an incident management system which allows for shorter system response times. The concept of such a system is the main subject of this paper. As COMPANION is a new system, it is also being tested at other European test sites and partly funded through the EU's telematics programme.
Samenvatting