The Department for Regional Development (DRD), Northern Ireland (NI) Roads Service is a partner in the Euro-Regional Project called STREETWISE. Theother partners in this project are the Department of Transport (GB), Highways Agency, Transport Scotland, Traffic Wales and the National Roads Authority (Republic of Ireland). STREETWISE is one of 7 Euro- Regional projects whose objective is to provide seamless traffic control facilities and travel information across the Trans European Road Network (TERN). Within STREETWISE each of the partners follows their national ITS Strategy but in a co-ordinated and networked manner. One of the principal objectives of the Roads Service ITS Strategy is to establish a fully integrated system for the management of traffic and the delivery of traffic information to the public. Significant progress has been made in delivering this objective, largely through the use of common standards and protocols such as Urban Traffic Management and Control (UTMC) and the Travel Information Highway (TIH).Within the Traffic Information and Control Centre (TICC) in Belfast, a traffic management and control system, based on a UTMC compliant common database acts as a central focus for a number of otherwise disparate systems deployed in both the urban and interurban domains. Data from the connected systems is stored within the UTMC and is used to determine and implement suitable traffic management strategies which span both the urban and inter-urban systems. The data stored in the common database is made available tothe traffic operators through a geographical interface, and, in conjunction with information from the CCTV network, is used to refine the integrated traffic management strategies. Progress has also been made towards the provision of a fully integrated traffic information service, principally through the centralisation of the road works and incident reporting process,and the use of the data exchange functionality of the UTMC database to integrate information. This emerging work includes significant developments which allow regional road works data to be entered into a central databasethrough a common system, thereby ensuring standardisation in the way suchinformation is recorded and presented to travellers. This paper provides an overview of the UTMC implementation by the Roads Service in Northern Ireland, and describes the connected systems and the information that flows between them. The emerging work undertaken to improve the provision of traffic information through the integration of UTMC data with incident and road works information is also described. Throughout the paper the focus is on the benefits these developments bring to the travelling public and to the Roads Service traffic operators. Three separate developments by Roads Service have been discussed which have contributed towards the integration of urban, inter-urban, and cross border data. Integrated traffic control and travel information has now been achieved at three levels: System level,where data is shared and actively used by the systems; Operational level,where multiple systems are controlled through a single interface; and Public traveller level, where information is disseminated in a common form through a single service. Cross border/boundary sharing of journey times is now possible and the facility exists for Roads Service to store data from the Republic of Ireland, and other Regions, in the UTMC database where it will be available for operational use. The option will also be available to provide the data through the Northern Ireland Traffic Watch website. Forthe covering abstract see ITRD E139491.
Samenvatting