Bristol City Council
Summary
We implemented the MATTISSE technology within Bristol City Council as part of the MobiService Centre project in 2000. This work drew on our development of the Common Database, part of the DfT’s Urban Traffic Management and Control (UTMC) research programme, and illustrated how we pull through advances in technology to the benefit of Local Authorities.
A UTMC adapter to the UTC SCOOT system was developed that pushes congestion data to the common database. Network managers can access this data and can input incident data. The Travel Advice Screen (TAS) Application subscribes to this data and updates are pushed to the TAS Application which displays traffic congestion levels on a schematic of the street network in central Bristol.
Technical Issues
Detailed congestion analysis is conducted remotely on the raw SCOOT data by an application (DEIS) within Leeds University before being distributed and displayed.
The Bristol CC Scoot system is connected via Ethernet to the Transmit Scoot Adaptor software. This application software listens for messages from the scoot system and when received they are processed to extract the individual messages for the defined scoot links. The level of congestion is then compare with the thresholds held in the database to determine if the reported levels of congestion is abnormal. Heartbeat detection of link failure is incorporated in the application software.
With the recent introduction of the DEIS facility an additional capability has been added which enables more detailed analysis of the congestion For this facility the scoot messages are processed and made persistent before making them available to the DEIS system in a standard format.
Once DEIS has carried out its data processing data on congestion, emission and noise for each Transmit link is then passed to the Transmit database to be made available for pushing to the Transmit clients.
Congestion data is pushed to the client viewer which is this application
is either a large scale Travel Advice Screen or a text based viewer installed
in the Bristol CC control room. The local terminals provide a tabular
presentation of congestion for the scoot links.