Strategic traffic management has an important part to play in meeting key objectives of the UK Highways Agency (HA) to make better use of the existing road network. Systems and services are required to provide traffic condition information to road users, so that they can make their own decisions about the best routes and travel times for their journeys. Traffic information will be derived from real-time data acquired from a network of roadside traffic monitoring devices. This network will require substantial investment in vehicle detector technology and communications. This paper summarises work described in four HA reports, and uses data from several months of trials on the M1 and M40 motorways. It considers three methods of reducing the cost of network monitoring: (1) the use of exception reporting; (2) the selection of economic transmission carriers from the roadside to data collection nodes; and (3) the application of video image processing and low-bandwidth traffic data. Exception reporting uses an historical model of the data at each collection site. Roadside data transmission costs are determined by the carrier type and tariffs of the service supplier. The work on image processing methods ended with a draft specification outlining requirements for image processing systems suitable for network monitoring.
Samenvatting