The paper describes an effort to connect dissimilar Traffic Management Centers (TMCs). The development of standards to support TMC to TMC communications has been the focus of several ITS standards groups: the Traffic Management Data Dictionary (TMDD) committee and the National Transportation Communication for ITS Protocol (NTCIP) Center-to-Center Working Group (C2C WG). Both of these groups have developed standards that can be utilized to allow TMCs to exchange data (including status information and command/control information). In 1999, the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT), along with the United States Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), initiated a program to develop a Center-to-Center (C2C) Communications infrastructure that would utilize the ITS National Standards to allow dissimilar TMCs to exchange data. The dissimilar systems to be connected are all implemented on different code bases. A major criterion of this program was to develop an extensible architecture that would allow dissimilar TMCs to seamlessly exchange data and to develop an infrastructure capable of supporting additional functionality to be added in the future (e.g., transit, parking). This paper describes an infrastructure that was developed and is serving as the backbone for the exchange of ITS data between TMCs throughout the state of Texas.
Samenvatting