England’s largest county, North Yorkshire, has opted to deploy a hosted and cloud-based traffic signal monitoring and management system to run its network of ITS equipment.
One of the leading traffic management companies in the UK, Siemens, has been awarded one of its first operational services contracts to provide traffic signal network management and monitoring for North Yorkshire County Council (NYCC). The new contract follows investment by NYCC in new technology and hosted systems, combined with the introduction of Siemens Stratos, a cloud-based system for all traffic management, control and monitoring requirements.
As part of North Yorkshire’s Highway Maintenance Service, the county council is responsible for the maintenance of a total of 337 installations, including 103 junctions, 205 pedestrian crossings and 29 variable message signs (VMS). North Yorkshire also maintains urban traffic control (UTC) systems in Harrogate and Scarborough to monitor and report on operational conditions at 57 sites in Harrogate and 27 in Scarborough. Additional monitoring is undertaken by a combined Siemens Remote Monitoring System (RMS) that monitors an additional 188 sites. All these sites and the VMS signs are now linked to the Stratos platform, with all the RMS signs soon to be migrated to Stratos as well, allowing the majority of the strategic traffic signal sites and VMS to be monitored from one overall system.
Developed using the latest cloud-based technology, Stratos delivers scalable real-time traffic management, information and control, ranging from basic monitoring to strategic control of complex urban traffic environments. Stratos is a hosted system, meaning there is no need for dedicated servers or client machines, which in turn means no capital cost, depreciation of assets or ongoing hardware maintenance costs. The system delivers a range of different application modules and will continue to expand to provide a complete solution for all traffic management, control and monitoring requirements. Stratos offers a complete system for strategic traffic management, journey time monitoring (JTM), VMS, car park and disruptions management.
“Linking existing local systems delivering traffic control and sign and car-park management in both Harrogate and Scarborough, Stratos provides scalable real-time traffic management, information and control, ranging from basic monitoring to strategic control, in a new ITS hosted solution,” explained Martin Andrews, head of operational services at Siemens. “This means that there is no need for dedicated servers or client machines, which in turn means no capital cost, depreciation of assets or ongoing hardware maintenance costs. Combined with our new service offering, NYCC will benefit from a consistent level of support to manage and monitor the traffic signals network and systems.”
Allan McVeigh, network strategy manager for NYCC, commented, “The new contract will provide NYCC with a higher level of operational support to manage the new systems and the NYCC network effectively. Using Stratos, Siemens will provide network management during normal office hours, and network monitoring and fault management on a 24 hour basis, seven days a week.”
