Overview
Over the past four years, Rijkswaterstaat, the Highways Agency and the Roads and Traffic Agency have worked together to share knowledge and approaches to solving common problems. This relationship is embedded in a joint Memorandum of Agreement. The organisations are very similar and share many of the same problems and challenges in managing their Strategic Road Network (SRN). Each organisation faces issues in addressing rising cost of ownership of traffic management systems due to end-of-life traffic technology systems which have strong vendor lock-in.
Neither organisation can solve its problems by purchasing existing commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) solutions in the traffic technology market because the traffic technology market has been slow to adopt a COTS approach. It is only via aggregated demand of the leading SRN operators that the market can be expanded, and costs reduced. Both organisations wish to decouple the technology solutions from the business requirements so that the business is free to implement new operating models and realise significant efficiency savings.
Without embarking on this programme, the HA will experience accelerated technology maintenance costs, reduced reliability, an inability to cost effectively meet the demands of Traffic Management Directorate (TMD) arising from the implementation of the Future Operating Model (FOM) and jeopardise TMD's programme of efficiency savings. Without this programme RWS will experience a lack of business flexibility. The CHARM programme has two primary objectives:
To establish and validate a Pre-Commercial Procurement (PCP) process in the participating countries
To use that process to identify new technologies and services to address the challenge of providing a Traffic Management System.
By the completion of this programme it is proposed to have a fully documented PCP process, capable of being run across multiple European countries