Publications | 25 August 2021
SBRI Congestion Challenge Project Reports

[picture courtesy of Vivacity]

The Department for Transport and GovTech have invested £1.5m in the development of three successful Congestion Challenge technology projects

Working with the Small Business Research Initiative (SBRI), the Department for Transport has provided £1.5m to fund the development of three innovative projects to give local authorities the tools to tackle congestion. The three projects have each focused on providing on-line tools the allow local authority operators to manage traffic, deal with incidents and events and monitor the efficiency of their traffic signals. The projects have each worked with a local authority lead client in order to ensure the end products are relevant and attractive to the wider local authority community.

The projects will be discussed in detail at the  TTF 2021 Congestion Challenge Event on Thursday 21 October between 9.30 and 3.30pm at the National Railway Museum in York.

The three projects are,

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PROACT (Vivacity Labs Siemens and Bournemouth, Poole and Christchurch Council)

                    

The PROACT project integrates data feeds, primarily between project partners Vivacity (video sensors) and Siemens (UTMC provider, induction loop sensors).The project has been developed to present multiple types of data on a single dashboard: Flow, Journey Time, Speed, Congestion. This was combined with the ability to see images from the video sensors. The project aimed to ensure that operators knew about abnormal traffic behaviours as they developed, enabling a proactive response.

Project PROACT 2021 (PDF)

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PATH (Inrix, White Willow and City of York Council)

This project has delivered a unique new suite of tools to help reduce congestion on UK roads associated with traffic signals. Its innovations include using, for the first time, data from individual connected vehicles to indicate congestion impact to that vehicle, rather than aggregated data commonly used today, so adding a much richer data picture, processing data to provide a “zoomable” picture of traffic performance from across a city, through corridor analysis down zooming into individual turning moves and delays at signals, using connected vehicle data to provide detailed data on potentially every UK signal junction without physically attending the site – using a “data as a service “ approach, developing tools to provide measures of performance of corridors and junctions to support prioritisation of maintenance, and before and after evaluation of improvements, and in the future real time signal optimisation and developing a knowledge base for using future connected vehicle data in traffic signals including the ability to potentially use Bus Open Data Service feeds for bus priority monitoring, and to support new services like Green Light Optimum Speed Advice (GLOSA).

                  

PROJECT PATH 2021 (PDF)

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SATO (40Two, Immense and Oxfordshire County Council

The SATO (Simulation and Analytics of Traffic operation) project has worked to create a real-time data driven tool capable of forecasting traffic impact as a result of changing highway conditions. The technical solution is an implementation of the Immense simulation platform, designed to evaluate the impact of supply-side changes to the highway network on major key performance indicators including traffic speed and volume. It is a cloud-hosted solution, accessible via a web browser and therefore available without the need for specialist hardware and software. The user-interface has been developed in close collaboration with potential users across Oxfordshire and other local authorities, with the aim of providing tooling that does not rely on expertise in traffic simulation and modelling.

           

PROJECT SATO 2021 (PDF)

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