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Greater Manchester |
Summary
Greater Manchester UTC operates CDMF to provide real time car park guidance, VMS control, roadworks monitoring and interfaces with UTC, RMS and NTCC. This system has evolved from the original implementation which focused on the car park management for Stockport Metropolitan Borough Council into an urban traffic management system which will support the ten District Councils which make up the County of Greater Manchester (AGMA districts).
The system now receives roadworks data from 6 of the 10 AGMA districts as well as feeds from NTCC, UTC, RMS and Siespace.
The UTMC car park monitor devices and car park guidance VMS are connected over a GPRS network to the central CDMF system in the centre of Manchester using UTMC compliant MIBs and SNMP protocols. This has delivered full a end- to-end UTMC system with support for legacy systems.
The system models the Greater Manchester "Strategic Core Road Network" and uses this to ensure that events on this network are given high visibility.
Key Features
The CDMF Viewer application provided as part of the solution provides the operator with a graphical interface to the CDMF server:
- The viewer shows all car parks, VMS and incident icons on the overview max of the relevant geographical area using OS map layers.
- Using a series of hierarchical and function related overlay windows, the viewer lists all car parks showing current occupancy and status and displays what is currently set on the car park guidance signs
- Operators can manually enter events (for example, accidents, incidents, local events likely to impact on traffic and travel, road works, temporary signals ….)
- Provides a graphical display of Car Parks and VMS (status, faults indication, current occupancy of car parks, current sign settings)
Mott MacDonald’s Car Park Guidance Subsystem provides the functionality to collect and disseminate car park space availability information and to set guidance VMS signs:
- Collects car park occupancy data from the car park;
- Maintains historic occupancy day profiles;
- When the car park is not contactable, uses the historic profiles to predict the likely car park usage at that time
- Enables car park status to be displayed on guidance VMS automatically based on space availability, by timed schedules or by manual overrides.
- Provides a fault monitoring capability for the Car Park Monitors and VMS Controllers highlighting faults via the Operator Display.
System Architecture
The CDMF server is a high availability, high density platform running Windows Server Operating System. It is rack-mounted with power, network connection and UPS available. The Server is supplied with a remote access interface capability for off-site support and maintenance.
The diagram below provides a high level overview of the system
The Common Database, Application Server and Car Park Guidance Subsystem run on the CDMF server. As the system grows, additional servers can be added to host or distribute these functions thereby providing scalability, robustness and appropriate performance. The CDMF Common Data Viewer is installed on a standard PC (meeting the minimum required specification) for both local and remote users
The Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) is the UTMC standard for the control of on-street equipment. This protocol is supported by both the Car Park Monitor Equipment and VMS Controllers. The system uses a communications infrastructure comprising network routers, ADSL routers, GPRS routers and firewalls supplied and managed by IDT Ltd and hosted on a TMobile GPRS service.