Overview
The Road Information System (SIS) is a decision support system. It must provide to the persons in charge of the roads and traffic management a efficient database for their decisions.
There are still a lot of conceptual issues regarding the priority of the road and traffic management domains. This affects mainly both spatial and temporal aspects as well as issues for the data exchange and the relevant technical reporting of the necessary transformations and interfaces.
The related standards have not all been developed until now. This situation affects the optimal use of a single SIS as well as the data exchange with other connected systems.
A thematically related group of projects is now gathered in the research package called “Increase of the benefits for the users of the road and transport information system”. Benefit increase means in this context to improve the effectiveness by increasing the quality of information for the decisions based on road information system (SIS). It is also an improvement of efficiency through shorter time and easier preparation of the decision process.
The objective of the research package, in particular concerns the following topics:
- Temporal aspects for a consistent description of road and traffic history
- Reference systems in urban areas and reference systems for the location of lanes
- Transformation in the data exchange between different users’ systems
- Rules while maintaining the semantics during transformation and data exchange.
- Exchange mechanisms with transport models
- Interfaces for the reporting systems of the road information system
With the perspective of the increase of the benefits, the two essential components of the research package and the related standards are:
Effectiveness: The quality of decision based on information system should be improved with a better consistency and completeness of the spatial and temporal aspects. This should facilitate the exchange of data with sustainable (robust) transformations.
Efficiency: The development of bases for decisions support must be facilitated in order to achieve with a minimum of “manual” effort. The technical characteristics of these aspects are presented in the project description.
The goal of this initial project is the development of the basic programme for the research package: objectives, description of work, milestones, legal aspects, costs, communication, and project management.
As a part of the initial project, the services described below for the research package are provided. The results of these services later form the basis for the overall management of the research package.
1. Development and description of the objectives and the content of the research projects that make up the research package, with inclusion of the relationship structure of each project among themselves;
2. Development and description of the project organization for the research package: Involved and their roles, duties and responsibilities, rights and duties, search and evaluation of participants
3. Preparation and documentation of processes and events in the research package and (roughly) in the individual research projects, as boundary conditions for the overall management of the research package and the project management of the individual research projects
4. Analysis and description of the context of the research package and specifying certain aspects environment for individual research projects
5. Development and documentation of legal and contractual aspects of the overall management of the research package and the individual research projects; Rules and suggestions for handling the procurement of all services for the overall project management of the research package and the research projects
6. Development of Cost Planning and Design of the Cost Controlling for the research package and for the individual research projects, as boundary conditions for the overall management of the research package and the project management of the individual research projects
7. Development of the Terms of Reference for the overall management of the research package and for the processing of the individual research projects by the research centers; The terms of reference support both the procurement of services (tendering, etc.) as well as the controlling of service provision
8. Development and documentation of the aspects of information and communication throughout the research package, ie between the Monitoring Committees, the overall project management and research bodies involved; Meeting organization and information flows;
9. Developing and documenting the rules for project documentation, in particular with regard to the implementation of a research package;
Rough contents of the final report of the overall management of the research package and the final reports of the individual res
Results
The final report of the initial project summarized research projects in below listed areas of transportation:
- Temporal aspects: to apply and to complete the existing rules and concepts for the temporal aspects and the chronological management of road data within a holistic and consistent concept.
- Reference systems for urban areas: to describe the conceptual rules for the definition and the management of the reference systems in urban areas. This study will include use-cases.
- Concepts of transformations between reference systems: to develop a holistic conceptual scheme for the transformation between spatial (linear, planar) referencing systems and topological-based referencing systems.
- Rules for maintaining the semantic within the transformations between road information systems and traffic management systems: development of rules and guidelines in order to guarantee the semantic stability of information objects while exchanging road data between information systems.
- Lane location referencing: to develop a semantic view and a conceptual scheme for the location referencing of the individual road lanes.
- Intelligent reporting interfaces for the road information system: to describe the rules for developing and operating the interfaces and services of the reporting system connected to the SIS/DWH
In the framework of this initial project were defined also basic characteristics of new projects.