CITYMAN POZNAN - Traffic Management and Control System for the City of Poznan
Overview
Background & policy context:
Poznan - the capital and largest city of the Poznan province, lies on the Warta River in west-central Poland with around 700 thousand inhabitants. The city is a major cultural, industrial, commercial and literary centre. Industries including metallurgical works, chemical and furniture factories, textile mills, and food-processing plants.
The city is located at the intersection of the busy highways between Berlin - Warsaw and Gdansk - Wroclaw which run through the heart of the city leading to particularly high levels of traffic in general and heavy goods vehicles in particular.
As in many larger cities in Central Europe, traffic in Poznan has been growing rapidly since the move to a market economy. Current infrastructure, both road networks and traffic control elements were designed for a different level of traffic flows. In the face of low investment funds available to build a necessary ring-road, the power to regulate traffic and optimise flow is essential to prevent chronic congestion and pollution problems in the centre of the city. The CITYMAN Poznan project arose against this background. With the aim to help solve this problem, a consortium including a leading Dutch supplier and the Polish consultancy firm PolTraffic in 1996 applied for and gained 1 million EUR of support for a traffic management project from the Dutch Government through the international EUREKA programme.
Within the project, the consortium defined and developed a signal controller upgrade plan for a pilot area of Poznan including the main arterial road. This included the development of a generic (single board computer) black box device, which locks on to and takes over the control function of the existing controller, enabling traffic responsive control, central control and network optimisation. A high level library of control functions was also adapted to local conditions and regulations, thus enabling the fast creation of easily adaptable controller software with advanced dynamic functionality.
3 main installations were tested and implemented in a pilot setting. Preliminary measurements showed a 30% increase in capacity of the artery.
The result of the project was the fulfilling of the stated objectives, satisfaction on all sides and commercial continuation of the project, Poznan has ordered over 40 more black boxes. The project is a good example of public-private co-operation, where challenges were met through a combination of professionally and commercially motivated commitment.
Objectives:
The research and development aims of the project were defined thus:
- Upgrade and integrate the installed base of "legacy" intersection controllers (for a section of the City). The aim was to change existing controllers from rigid non-traffic responsive into traffic responsive controllers with a capability to become integrated into a traffic management and control network.
- Adapt a generic control programme, which is universally applicable in order to avoid dedicated development for each specific intersection.
- Introduce a central management system on the basis of the proven Nederland Haarlem CityMan concept.
- Introduce alternative detection methods (such as camera based) where it proved expensive or ineffective to install classical loop hole detection.
- Achieve optimisation both at a central network and a local intersection level (2 tier optimisation).
Methodology:
The pilot project was implemented for the upgrade of 10 existing controllers and 5 new controllers were applied on one of the main arteries of Poznan. The above targets were met and the project is moving forward on a commercial basis. The city has ordered over 40 controllers to be upgraded and the fruitful relationship between the Dutch supplier, PolTraffic and the City of Poznan continued to grow healthily.
Technical profile of project
Three main installations were tested and implemented in a pilot setting:
- 10 Polish legacy controllers were upgraded into intelligent traffic responsive and network integrated controllers and 3 new traffic responsive controllers were installed on the main Remonta artery road;
- At the Most Teatralny intersection, a new traffic responsive controller with complex tram priority system;
- A new traffic responsive controller using Autoscope video detection for the Roando Kaponiera intersection.
The following research and development tasks were accomplished :
1. Upgrading and integrating the installed base of "legacy" intersection controllers
This upgrade was made by creating a generic black box single-board computer for each legacy controller, which took over the traffic control function while leaving intact the original shell (although allowing for other inputs such as video detector data). Ensuring a reliable communication between the black box and the legacy controller was crucial to the success of this upgrade. It was achieved by :
- creating a generic "master" protocol in the black box which should be able to communicate in principle with any type of legacy controller.
- persuading the manufacturer of the legacy controller to develop a "slave" protocol adaptation of his controller conforming to the "master" protocol specification and therefore connecting his device with the black box.
2. Adaption of a generic control system which is universally applicable
This involved the application and adaptation of a library of high level generic routines, which are used to "build" controller software for the black box device. The library has over 150 functions and enables very fast construction and adaptation of advanced controller logic. The routines were adapted here for Polish peculiarities such as special tram signals and PT priority and static right turn gree
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