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 to deploy its advanced traffic management system (ATMS) in Iowa.
The Iowa Department of Transportation (Iowa DOT) has selected Q-Free’s OpenTMS software platform for a comprehensive overhaul of its statewide traffic management and operations. The move makes Iowa DOT among the first in the USA to move to an on-demand cloud-based computing platform, boosting system redundancy, scalability, and reliability. The contract is valued at US$2.5m (NKr22m), with deliveries due to start later this year and most of the revenue impact in 2020. First introduced in 2002, OpenTMS is an off-the-shelf, cloud-enabled ATMS that will monitor Iowa’s traffic data, manage connected ITS devices such as traffic sensors, video cameras, dynamic message signs (DMS), and mitigate the mobility and safety impacts of unpredictable congestion across the state.
ATMS platforms need to be able to interface with multiple platforms and other systems, providing a data collection, analysis and distribution capability that enables effective real-time management across regions and even whole countries. Q-Free’s ATMS solutions are scalable across multiple traffic management centers (TMCs) and groups of stakeholders, and offer a high degree of future-proofing in the face of rising numbers of increasingly sophisticated applications. The company’s off-the-shelf, cloud-enabled OpenTMS service is a platform-independent, extensible, ATMS solution built around an open, modular architecture. OpenTMS runs in a web browser and is designed to support the dynamic traffic management marketplace where configurability and customization is of primary concern as enterprise architectures, GIS and database technology, and ITS devices are continually evolving.
“Congestion is a hazardous thing, posing safety threats, and negatively impacting mobility and travel time reliability,” noted Morten Andersson, SVP for Q-Free’s Americas region. “By helping Iowa DOT better monitor and respond to adverse weather, road work, accidents, and other incidents, we can help diminish those risks.”
