Sharing information in a traffic management centre

Transcription

1 22 nd ITS World Congress, Bordeaux, France, 5 9 October 2015 Paper number ITS-2479 Henk den Breejen Technolution B.V., P.O. Box 2013, 2800 BD Gouda, The Netherlands, T: E: henk.den.breejen@technolution.eu Abstract Our traffic control centres are very important for the safety and traffic flow on our roads. If you were to bring all stakeholders and specialists that you need and whose advice you would like to have on any given situation into the same control room, you just wouldn t have enough space. That s why it s important that other stakeholders or parties involved can view the information that is present in the control room from outside. To solve the problems we developed SigmaXG. With SigmaXG, the road traffic controller can switch any image he wants to his video wall (or combination of screens). He can arrange these freely if he wishes and share it with other stakeholders. Also other data can easily distributed in real time to other locations and stakeholders. Keywords: Cooperation, data exchange, traffic control centre system Sharing information in a traffic control centre Defining the problem Our traffic control centres are very important for the safety and traffic flow on our roads. If you were to bring all stakeholders and specialists that you need and whose advice you would like to have on any given situation into the same control room, you just wouldn t have enough space. That s why it s important that other stakeholders or parties involved can view the information that is present in the control room from outside. That s the first challenge. The second challenge is that it s undesirable physically to have all the equipment in the control room, because this often consists of hardware that has to be kept in a conditioned server room. In sum, it should to be possible to view or control systems from within the control room that are themselves outside. Example A road traffic controller standing at the control panel in the De Wijde Blik traffic control room in Velsen is confronted with a major incident on the A10-South motorway to Amsterdam. He responds by performing the first actions that are required. He closes the lanes involved, inspects the area through

2 the cameras that are positioned in the vicinity of the incident, mobilises the police and ambulance and fire services and also sends road inspectors to the scene to take the first measures to secure it. In order to resolve the situation quickly he wishes to consult the operational traffic management expert, who is, however, not present in the control room. The operational traffic management expert in turn would like to consult his immediate colleagues because of the complexity of the situation that has emerged. The police control room, moreover, would also like to see the camera images in order to deploy police officers in the best way possible. Problem It all begins with operating the camera management system. This system can be operated from the control panel. The controller can use it to display camera images of the scene on his video wall. He can then close the lanes involved using the traffic signal system. This system is always at his disposal on the control panel. Then he has to call the emergency services and the coordinator of the road inspectors. Things are moving smoothly so far. He then calls the operational traffic management expert, who does not have the same view of the road situation that he has, which makes it difficult to confer. The same is true for the second traffic management expert, who isn t present either. The police control room has no insight into the situation on the road and does not know what is required exactly. This puts additional pressure on the road traffic controller, who is receiving extra telephone calls from people asking him to provide verbal information. This problem arises on account of the way our traffic control centres are currently organised. In order to guarantee safety and traffic flow on our roads, we ve introduced all kinds of systems in our traffic control centres. These systems are there to enable the road traffic controllers and traffic management experts to do their jobs properly. A wide variety of systems and an even wider selection of data are used. Thus there are systems that ensure that the camera images produced by the roadside cameras can be viewed in the traffic control centres, both from the incident management cameras and from the rush-hour lane cameras. And not just the camera images, but also systems that operate the cameras, the so-called PTZ controls. There are also systems that monitor. These provide traffic data, such as speeds, traffic volume and travel times. Other systems again use these monitoring data to produce predictions on the basis of traffic models. Yet other systems control the variable message signs and operate the traffic lights on the intersections and the motorway s entry slip roads. There are systems that control the signals displayed on the matrix display panels above the motorways, decision support systems, all manner of analytical systems that work with historical data and so on. The traffic control centre is a hub of systems that provide and demand information, and often operate independently of each other. They all serve the road traffic controllers who are standing at their control panels in the control room, as well as the traffic management experts who do their jobs outside the control room. Cooperation between different road authorities also creates a need for the exchange of data and for being able to view and even control each other s camera images. Increasing cooperation and exchange of information between the traffic control centres and emergency services and police control rooms 2

3 further strengthen this need. A lot has been done over the last few years to make interaction between these systems possible, often with varying degrees of success. If you look at a traffic control centre squinting through your eyelashes you will see a hub with a huge number of sources and destinations. All of it joined together through the magic of the network. At least, that is what is being tried, with all the consequences that this brings. Networks that become spontaneously overtaxed, data that is transmitted around the network in threefold, delays that occur where they should absolutely not be occurring (for instance in the transmission of camera images). The still relatively closed nature of the systems is another limiting factor, preventing the whole from working optimally, to say the least. What would you like to change about it if you looked at our traffic control centres functionally? Integrate everything? But everything is a lot and with what miraculous system would you do that? Join everything together? But using what? Or have the freedom to integrate separate systems, while being able to determine the level of integration yourself? That would be great, wouldn t it? Health care We do a lot of projects in health care and we see problems there that are comparable to those in the world of the traffic control centre. The operating theatre is the space where control is, but this room is limited in size. If you were to bring all medical specialists (of your own hospital or from other hospitals) that you need and whose advice you would like to have for a specific operation into one single operating theatre, you just wouldn t have enough space, nor would it be technically possible in relation to scheduling and location. This is why it is important that other medical specialists can view the information that is present in the operating theatre from outside, without loss of quality. On the other hand you don t want to have all equipment and the patients health record systems physically in your operating theatre, because this is often central hardware that has to be kept in a separate server room. Morever, the systems used each have their own specialities, characteristics and image resolution. In sum, it should be possible to easily view systems from within the operating theatre that are themselves outside. There are special boxes that can take over the control of a computer, with their own cables, or one-on-one via the network. But in that case how do you deal with video and with storage of data, mixing of images, format differences etc.? Together with Philips Healthcare we are currently realizing the innovative project MEDUSA (MEdical Distributed Utilization of Services & Applications): we are enhancing the quality of diagnoses and decisions for acute and critical situations in relation to the condition of a patient. We are doing this by making it possible to share images, by enabling dynamic real-time complex image processing and the involvement of medical specialists in different locations. Very high data and image quality is of the utmost importance in and around operating theatres. We have acquired a lot of experience in this field with distributing very high-resolution video images in 3

4 real time (max. 4msec delay) to locations outside the operating theatre. We are also able to combine and mix images and to access data remotely (e.g. patient records such as scans, test results and other medical details). We can display the data in a single integrated image (screen). We have developed a solution that makes all this possible using a standard (Gigabit) Ethernet network. We ve called it SigmaXG. SigmaXG connects sources with destinations, using only the standard network. It offers ultimate flexibility to bring video and control from any source to any screen you want. The network becomes one big switch. Different kinds of video, with and without compression, different formats of video and monitor signals, 4K camera images or very small and compressed images, real-time mixing of images, remote controlling of systems. All this by making your keyboard, mouse, joystick and your monitor screen, for instance your GUI, available remotely. These things are all possible. But so is data storage in a different location, USB storage over the network, video processing and multicasting of images. How it works: Using specific interface modules, your data signal is digitised in an internal format that is independent of the external interface. We can distribute the data transparently to another SigmaXG interface (output) module through the internal format. The data is converted back into the specific interface format in the output module. In this way, data can be distributed with minimal delay (less than 1msec). Such data could consist of patient records, computer images, scans or camera images of the operation, but also control data for a system. The design of this solution is generic and it can be applied to a wide range of sectors in addition to health care. Application in the traffic control centre The control room of a traffic control centre is not unlike an operating theatre. It is also a centre where all data comes together and where there is an overview. To return to the example of the road traffic controller and the major incident: With SigmaXG, the road traffic controller can switch any image he wants to his video wall (or combination of screens). This could be a one-on-one image or a mix of the systems required. He can arrange these freely if he wishes. In this way he will be able sooner to obtain a clear overview of the situation after the major incident on the A10-South to Amsterdam. He can directly share the image of the traffic signal system and the camera images of the incident management cameras with the coordinator of the road inspectors, so that the latter has a clear view of the situation and can therefore make the right decisions about the deployment of road inspectors. He can also transmit the camera images to the police control room, making it possible to determine the correct deployment of police officers. He can even hand over control of a camera if needs be. In addition, conferring with the traffic 4

5 management experts will be much easier and it will be possible to decide as a team on the follow-up strategy. This means that together they will be able to coordinate the incident, provide any alternative routes required and give advice much faster and more accurately. In the aftermath, they will be able to analyse together whether the incident was handled properly by studying the measuring systems, which they can view integrated on a single screen. Furthermore, traffic management experts and consultancy firms will have a clearer and more transparent picture of the data. This will allow them to conduct their analysis in a simpler and better way using valuable data. What is required: First of all, a good infrastructure, that is a network infrastructure (e.g. standard Ethernet). Your network will become the solid basis for the joining of your systems. The network switch will become the spider in the web. Then you need SigmaXG products, to convert the specific interfaces into a uniform format. There are no requirements with regard to the computers or the equipment that can be connected to the SigmaXG products. The screens can be standard screens. If you prefer very high resolution, you could buy one or more 4K screens. It is not specifically necessary to purchase video walls. This functionality can be carried out by standard screens. This results in an significant cost reduction. A reference implementation: For the traffic centre in Velsen we are building a reference implementation with SigmaXG. The solution is a little bit different as the one in the operating theatre, because the numbers of cameras the traffic management centres have are very huge. Instead of purchasing new SigmaXG boxes we implement the SigmaXG software on a server. It is a soft solution of SigmaXG. So we can use the existing and legacy components of the traffic management environment. In the reference implementation three traffic centres are sharing their cameras with each other. The traffic management centre from Rijkswaterstaat in Velsen, the traffic management centre of the province of North Holland and the traffic centre of the City of Amsterdam are working together and sharing their cameras. Because of the crossover view the personnel in traffic centres can work more as a team to manage the traffic around Schiphol airport and the capital of Holland Amsterdam within this important region of North Holland. 5

6 A number of applications with SigmaXG have been illustrated below. Figure 1 Example of transparent USB Access remote USB sticks from your workplace (control panel). Print from USB printers that are in a different location and use remote scanners. You can hand over control (through keyboard and mouse) over data or over a remote system from your universal workplace to another workplace. Figure 2 Dynamic switching Route images, such as camera images, to any specific control location that you have chosen. This can be switched dynamically. The incident management camera images, for instance, are being displayed on the video wall of a designated control panel. If another control room, e.g. a police surveillance switchboard, needs those images, they can be switched there. 6

7 Figure 3 Multicasting Camera images are often required on screens in more than one location, and often simultaneously. SigmaXG allows you to multicast the camera images, so that they can be simultaneously displayed on different locations. And all this without overtaxing the network. Figure 4 Storage Storing data or video images on a hard disk or external medium can be easily realised. It is possible to store video images while simultaneously playing them at high speed (10Gb/s). We can realise this because we have full control over the distribution. 7

8 Figure 5 Mixing We can also mix images. This makes it possible to display images from several different sources on the same screen. For instance: live camera images, the GUI of the control system and the live analytical system can be captured in one image and displayed on a single screen. This image integration is very useful for obtaining a full overview without having to subsume the specific functionality of these separate systems into one system. Figure 6 Processing The use of high speed and complete images makes it possible to carry out video processing, such as video analysis, processing raw data and enhancing image quality. When the amount of data/video becomes too large to be handled by a human operator, the combined system can become smart : functionality will be added to the system to analyse the input data and to give automatic alerts when certain conditions have been met. Information from multiple sources can be combined. A control room turns into a System of Systems (SoS): multiple systems can be controlled from a combined user interface, and data from multiple systems are being processed by smart nodes to support human decision making. 8

9 What makes SigmaXG unique? What makes the SigmaXG solution unique is that it uses ordinary (Gigabit) Ethernet and that it doesn t require any special hardware other than the conversion box (adapter). Nor does the spider in the web, the network switch, require a special (expensive) variant. SigmaXG products come in several designs. The connection options and therefore the formats differ depending on your requirements. An example is given in figure 7. Figure 7 Example of a SigmaXG box Advantages of Sigma XG With SigmaXG, Technolution offers a platform for building real-time systems of systems. Out of the box, SigmaXG offers the functionality to integrate user interfaces and to distribute user interfaces and information from the component systems to multiple workplaces. In addition, SigmaXG offers the infrastructure for high speed data distribution, storage and processing. SigmaXG offers flexibility and the API to set up your system configuration. SigmaXG has been designed with extensibility and robustness in mind. It therefore does not have a central authority that manages the overall status of the system. Control in the system is distributed. With the API you can query the network for the connected devices, and new devices will announce themselves on the network. If you prefer, you can easily build your own central authority with the API, based on the application requirements of your application domain. SigmaXG has been designed to put you in control. 9

10 References 1. Frank van der Linden, Paul van Koningsbruggen and Rob Smeets for ITEA 2 (20XX). MEDUSA, Medical Distributed Utilization of Services & Applications, Full Project Proposal. 2. Jacco Wesselius and Adriaan Schipper (2014). "Het netwerk als systeemlijm" Article Bits&Chips #6. 10