Overview
MISS aimed to develop an innovative platform to dynamically sense and predict natural and infrastructure conditions, so as to improve safety and efficiency of transport operations in a multi-environmental scenario. This project aimed to increase citizens' and operators' safety by enabling a just in time intelligent computation of an open dynamic road surveillance network a streamlining alerting tasks under the daily duty provided by clerical staff. In this way MISS will pay attention to viability of the system in the long term. The platform will use advanced communication technologies for on-line services as well as high capacity storage devices for off-line services and applications, in addition to a new advanced algorithm to simulate risk assessment. The MISS adaptable platform is a mobile system explicitly designed to monitor rough environmental and infrastructure conditions and it will be integrated with any pre-existing legacy system. It will enable intelligent exchange of structured information between the operational fleet vehicles and the Unified Operative Centre where information will be elaborated and actions planned.
The main objective of the MISS project was to build a Unified Operative Centre, aimed at improving vehicle safety and mobility. This Unified Operative Centre has to support and integrate the activities of different structures at provincial level. It would manage the road monitoring activity of these organisations: the urban police, the civil protection and the road services. We estimated that each entity would improve its efficiency, starting from these operational points:
- defining some guidelines to coordinate the institutional working activities;
- integrating the communication and effort among the operators and vehicles of the three entities.
By building on these points within the UOC we aimed to :
- tie together the three entities, improving their administrative and operational processes;
- guarantee efficiency and effectiveness when managing events;
- satisfy the optimisation needs of resources on the ground and inside the operative centre;
- extend the road safety among citizens and throughout the area.
The UOC would support the operational, planning and policy decisions to extend road knowledge, using information technology tools to store and extract all the information needed. It would also support the prevention and forewarnings of the events, analysing all the basic aspects.
The platform was composed of two main components:
- an innovative on-board kit: to be installed on the fleet cars and to include a black box here named MSCU (MISS Storage Communication Unit), where raw environmental and infrastructure data will be stored and elaborated; then, these data will be sent via a radio-communication network to the Unified Operative Centre;
- a Unified Operative Centre (UOC) where data coming from a monitoring system that is comprised of a set of mobile and fixed distributed devices will be stored and analysed by an innovative simulation algorithm to find a strategy to improve the end-users safety and security and to avoid traffic congestion.
Funding
Results
The MISS system provides necessary information and documentation for the operation controllers to initiate counter measures against misuse of bus lanes either immediately by calling a towing car in case of severe disturbances or normally by information of police. The owner of the vehicle will be identified by license plate.
Based on experiences from regular supervision of parking meters or speed limits, it is expected that the number of infringements will decrease significantly after the new system is known to the road users. By this it will increase safety for bus drivers, passengers and private traffic due to the reduction of risky situations.
Automated regular monitoring of stops will release drivers from drawing their attention to visual inspection and reporting during driving.
Policy implications
Probably critical issues of data privacy are considered by early involvement of the commissioner for data privacy of the State of Berlin.