The North American division of Norwegian company Q-Free, a leading global supplier of tolling and intelligent transportation systems (ITS), has been awarded a contract extension to provide transport video and data services in Virginia.
Q-Free will provide the Virginia Department of Transportation (VDOT) with O&M (Operations and Maintenance) services for the agency’s Transportation Video and Data (TV&D) project throughout the 2018 financial year (FY18).
All work will be performed as per the terms and conditions of the original Master Subcontract Agreement between Q-Free Open Roads and Iteris in October 2011, which was later amended in September. Q-Free’s share of the contract is valued at US$367,608 and began in July. Starting in 2011, the partnership between Iteris and Q-Free successfully deployed a comprehensive solution for sharing video and data that can readily adapt to rapidly evolving technologies and information dissemination through VDOT’s TV&D project.
Now continuing the maintenance and operations for the TV&D system, Q-Free’s services will provide 24×7 monitoring and on-call support and a 99% uptime service level agreement (SLA), as well as a software warranty for all TV&D data applications.
The company will also perform system configuration and release management, including preventive maintenance, routine code updates, and user management within the system. Under the order, which consists of three tasks, Q-Free will operate and maintain:
• The back-end data services that ingest data from VDOT’s Traffic Operations Centers (TOCs) and the State Data Gateway, store the data in a TV&D database, and provide processed feeds and database access to registered users through VDOT’s data sharing portal;
• The secondary data center (referred to as BTP) for the TV&D data services;
• The statewide travel time engine at both the primary and secondary data centers.
“As we continue our partnership with Iteris and our longstanding relationship with VDOT, our team is proud to contribute the innovative solutions necessary to ensure the continued success of the TV&D system on this critical project,” commented Christopher Melton, managing director for Q-Free’s North American tolling and inter-urban divisions.
Q-Free has also announced that it will be demonstrating three new technology applications at next week’s ITS World Congress in the Danish capital, Copenhagen (September 17-21):
• The Connected Urban Bike Route Demonstration will operate on two electric bicycle routes where visitors will interact with five different Q-Free Cooperative-ITS technologies, receiving real-time visual and audio guidance from tablets fixed to the e-bikes;
• A presentation of the company’s role in the project to improve and modernize the tolling system on the city’s Storebælt Bridge, where Q-Free will provide of state-of-the-art video and supporting technologies that will increase capacity, improve the customer experience, and reduce the cost of operation;
• Launch of the ParQSense Smart Sensor for outdoor parking that is designed to help end-users find a space and allow operators to optimize areas that are experiencing higher demand, as well as the Q-Free HUB that offers sensor data collection, processing, storage, and provisioning.Â
