At this week’s ITS European Congress in Glasgow (June 6-9) two submitted papers were chosen by organizers to be recognized in the Best Paper Awards. Here Traffic Technology Today speaks exclusively to the winners, to get the inside story on their world-leading research.
Incident Detection Based on Bus Data, by Paula Syrjärinne (pictured), a researcher at the University of Tampere, Finland, received the Best Scientific Paper award.
The inspiration for Syrjärinne’s paper came from an already existing system of data collection. “In Tampere, all of the public buses transmit information about their location once per second,” says Syrjärinne. “Until recently this information was only really used by passengers wanting to know when their next bus would arrive,”
“Buses travel around the city throughout the day, so they give a good sense of what’s happening in the traffic. At the University, we’ve been collecting this bus data for a couple of years,” she says. “From it, we made a model of what traffic usually looks like in Tampere and we were also able to calculate how long it would take to travel between different points in the city.
“If there is a significant slowdown of traffic, you can systematically conclude that it’s likely that an accident or some other type of incident has happened. My paper summarizes all of this,” says Syrjärinne. Following Syrjärinne’s research, the city of Tampere now uses buses to detect incidents, from bus data.
The Dutch C-ITS Reference Architecture by Igor Passchier (pictured), senior technical specialist at Tass International, The Netherlands, won the Best Technical Paper award.
Passchier explains that the paper came about following roundtable meetings held in The Netherlands, with members of the government, industry representatives and research institutes, held to combine knowledge from Dutch and European projects. The roundtable meetings were facilitated by Ditcm Innovations.
“We tried to come up with technical solutions to ensure that something that has worked for one project can be applied to another,” says Passchier. In the Architecture for Cooperative Systems roundtable, the aim was to find out how ITS cooperates in The Netherlands, how solutions have been implemented, and what the outcomes were.
“The outcomes of the meeting are what is described in The Dutch C-ITS Reference Architecture. The results of projects such as Amsterdam Practical Trials and Ghost Files A58, are outlined, as well as the technical findings, legal aspects and human impact.” he says.
Both papers were presented at the ITS European Congress (June 8).
For more on the Amsterdam Practical Trial, mentioned in Passchier’s paper, don’t miss the forthcoming June/July 2016 edition of Traffic Technology International magazine.
