Austrian traffic technology supplier Swarco has released MyCity, a new modular traffic management platform that allows city authorities to improve mobility for their citizens throughout the entire journey by monitoring multiple modes of transport.
As cities are fighting pollution and congestion issues, the ability to support multimodality is rapidly becoming an ever increasing and important part of a sustainable transportation system. It is not unusual that a commuter’s everyday journey often includes several modes of transport, that could include driving their private car to a station, finding a good place to park, switching to public transport, and finally jumping on a e-scooter or bike to reach their final destination. For cities, maintaining the big picture of traffic demand and supply, based on data from different sources and various modes of transport will be key for making the travel experience safer, quicker and more environmentally sound.
Traditionally Swarco has delivered domain-specific solutions within the field of urban traffic, highways, parking and public transport. The company’s new MyCity solution is now bringing this multi-system knowledge together in a holistic platform approach that it calls Collaborative Interactive Traffic Management. MyCity allows cities to power the collaborative ecosystem by integrating different source of data and use them for adaptive traffic control, by combining data analytics, cloud services and roadside equipment in a multimodal environment.
MyCity is an open platform that can be extended to the individual customer’s needs. A city can start small with an ‘as a Service’ business model and add required functionalities when needed, with the easy integration of various legacy systems, data sources and information systems. For larger cities Swarco can offer full blown tailormade on-premises solutions where various sources of data are integrated to determine meaningful information on the current and future traffic situation and determine an optimisation strategy.
The MyCity system features:
- Integration platform – Combining all kinds of devices and systems, from traffic light controllers to parking facilities;
- Responsive and Customisable Design – Dashboards that allow the addition of new functions and features and possibility to switch intuitively between different type of devices;
- Device monitoring – A merged and updated version of Swarco’s existing Omnia Basic, Topic and Cloud products to manage alarms and operational status of connected devices;
- Data Management and Analytics – Controlling, analysing and visualising data that has been collected from a variety of detectors and sensors;
- Adaptive Traffic Control and Network Adaptive Traffic Control – Complete coverage of signal control solutions, ranging from simple rule-based control for individual intersections to sophisticated adaptive control for a complete city network;
- C-ITS Ready – The possibility to connect existing infrastructure to vehicles and road users for more advanced ITS applications;
- Traffic Engineering tools – Integration of engineering tools for planning and evaluation of intersections, testing of traffic signal control and simulation of traffic flow;
- Single Sign-On – A single sign-on system for all Swarco equipment going forward.
“Sustainable traffic management goes beyond optimizing the flow of individual cars. I strongly believe that if you want to manage mobility properly, we need to look at the big picture, including all kinds of transportation and not only cars,” said Wojciech Goj, marketing manager for Swarco’s ITS Division. “To be able to do this, the traffic management system needs to know what’s going on in different parts of the transport system. In order to provide citizens a better journey, from doorstep to destination, we must look beyond boundaries of systems and transport modes.”
