Thursday, 1st April 2010 - 12:35
ITS United Kingdom makes 2010 Awards for Excellence
ITS (UK), the Intelligent Transport Society for the United Kingdom, has made five Awards for excellence in ITS:
The Hills Rees annual award for personal contribution has been given to Richard Harris of Logica (pictured with Steven Norris).
The young ITS professional of the year award was made to Peter Routledge of IRC.
The Scheme of the year award went to Transport for London for the London Congestion Analysis Project (LCAP)
Two Forward Thinking awards for innovation were made:-
to David Bradbrook of the Highways Agency for the National Roads Telecommunications Services Contract
and to Transport for London for the London CVIS (Co-operative Vehicle Infrastructure Systems) Trial
The awards are open to any organisation or individual with a UK business office and that has a significant UK telematics or other ITS content.
The nominations were judged by an eminent panel of ITS professionals chaired by ITS (UK) President and former Transport Minister, Steven Norris. The Panel Members were:-
Ian Patey, Mouchel
Kevin Borras, h3b media
Jill Adam, Department for Transport
Prof. John Nelson, University of Aberdeen
Janet Cooke, London TravelWatch
Roy Brannen, Transport Scotland
Neal Skelton, ITS United Kingdom
The awards were presented by Steven Norris at the ITS United Kingdom President’s Dinner at Painters Hall in the City of London on 30 March 2010 in London.
More details about the Award winners:-
1. Forward Thinking Award (1)
David Bradbrook
Highways Agency
National Roads Telecommunications Services Contract
David has developed and delivered a world class telecommunications system for the English motorway network that underpins ALL of the ITS systems that can now be enabled in the road network. This project took 4 years to design and develop and two years to deliver (on time and on budget) – now the ITS community in England has a national communications network based on IP technology that allows new ITS technologies to be added at the roadside, virtually at will, with little incremental cost for the communications network to carry the data traffic. It has allowed dramatic expansion of the use of camera technology and embedded secure video storage in the road infrastructure and acts as the bearer of the all data and control functions for schemes such as ATM. In being such an “underlying” structure and technology it is not as visible as some systems, but without it the Highways Agency and the ITS community would struggle to deploy and manage new technology in the motorway network.
In addition to the technical feat of building the new network the NRTS project has significantly reduced costs of maintenance by replacing obsolete and widely varying regional telecommunications infrastructure with some of the worlds fastest IP routers and optical technology. The £500m project was built on a PFI basis with project sponsors Fluor Corporation leading the financing and delivery and the Treasury has issued a report which highlights this as a significant success for public/private partnership. David was instrumental in the negotiation in securing excellent value for the British Government.
2. Forward Thinking Award (2)
The London CVIS (Co-operative Vehicle Infrastructure Systems) Trial
The London CVIS trial is the first co-operative systems application demonstrated in the UK and first CVIS trial in Europe to involve real freight operators and their daily operations.
TfL transformed an existing roadside loading bay into a specially created CVIS one on the busy Earls Court Road, in the west of the UK capital. The trial demonstrated that innovative co-operative systems technology has the potential not only to improve freight delivery in London, but also to be easily transferable to other parts of the UK or Europe.
Eight Operators are using the system, ranged from multi-nationals such as Coca Cola to small, local operators like The Barn, showing that CVIS technology is sustainable and can be readily utilised by a wide range of operators and vehicle types.
During the trial, freight operators pre-booked the loading bay via a web booking system, a new innovation. Dynamic in-trip information was sent to the vehicle in transit on the estimated time of arrival. Locally, when approaching the bay, the road side unit validated the booking.
Stakeholder co-operation, a fundamental stepping stone for CVIS implementations, was very encouraging, and included freight operators and enforcement authorities.
The final evaluation is currently being undertaken. Initial findings indicate CVIS:
reduced the number of penalty charge notices, and gave efficiency savings (environmental, congestion, economic).
A wider roll-out is very likely to increase the efficiency of traffic management based on these technological and business benefits.
The system used for this trial is based on an open platform that allows third parties to develop new applications or products, fostering further innovation.
3. Scheme / Product of the Year
The London Congestion Analysis Project (LCAP)
LCAP is an ITS application for the processing of ANPR camera images into vehicle journey times which is then translated into key indicators for the management of London’s road network performance.
The London Congestion Analysis Project demonstrates the innovative application of technology and business intelligence to the capture of ANPR camera data to generate information that is transforming TfL’s capability to improve road network performance in London. It does this by delivering data to enable performance metrics based on vehicle journey times to be calculated, such as speeds, congestion and journey time reliability.
LCAP has been embedded as a web enabled dashboard at TfL that enables the sustainable transfer of knowledge of road network performance outcomes across many different directorates. The dashboard has incorporated innovative techniques and technology to enable its data to be represented on a fully scalable web rendering of the road network supplied by ESRI.
Through the use of LCAP information TfL is able to take a leadership role in coordinating the response of highway authorities and other stakeholders on the road network such as utility companies to improve overall road network performance.
The current annual cost of congestion on London’s main roads is estimated to be in the range of £3 to £5 billion. LCAP has demonstrated its benefit through the provision of capability to calculate the cost of congestion of individual events and incidents such as road traffic accidents and street-works. This enables TfL to calculate the benefits and costs of taking different courses of action to improve the day-to-day operation of the network and thereby, reducing overall congestion, improving journey times and journey time reliability for all road users in London.
LCAP is currently being further developed to integrate incident and event data to enable better cause effect analysis capability. The technology and capability provided by LCAP can easily be transferred to other highway authorities.
4. Rees Hills Award for Outstanding Personal Contribution
Richard Harris, Director Intelligent Transport Systems, Logica
Richard has been active in ITS since DRIVE I and PROMETHEUS in the late 1980s / early 1990s. He came into prominence with the London demonstration of Autoguide which he helped to run with Ian Catling. In recent years he has held Director-level appointments with Faber-Maunsel, WSP and now Logica.
Richard’s outstanding personal contributions have been in the innovative application of ITS concepts to problems and furthering the development of ITS at a European level where he has been untiring in his efforts. He was instrumental in organising the intelligent car demonstrations at the Information Society showcase for the G7 Heads of State as far back as February 1995. He continued to make his mark on a string of pioneering projects such as SOCRATES, ATLANTIC and EASYWAY and with Faber-Maunsel he took a very prominent role in the Euro-regional project, STREETWISE. He has been a leading protagonist for the European Action Plan on ITS and through Logica he has led a successful bid to be appointed to support the development of the Plan under a Framework contract awarded last November.
Richard’s huge creativity, commitment, enthusiasm and ability to cut through humbug have touched many in the ITS community over the years, not only in the UK and Europe but further afield. He is an energetic supporter of the network of National ITS Organisations and was recently in Saudi Arabia on this mission. Currently he is mid-way though a 2-year term as chair of the IBEC management committee and a 4-year term as English language secretary to the Technical Committee on Network Operations for World Road Association (PIARC) having served as a member of the PIARC Committee for 4 years prior to that. He is also very active with the IRU.
5. Young Professional of the Year
Peter Routledge (age 24)
Peter graduated in June 2010 with an IT degree and immediately joined the ‘family business’, the Ian Routledge Consultancy. Peter immediately started to work on the implementation/ refurbishment of traffic signals, replacement of UTC systems, RTI bus priority roll out and IP communications implementation and quickly realised that essential information was often incorrect or not available. This resulted in delays in our work as well as loss of network efficiency, poor maintenance and increased operating costs.
To overcome this Peter developed IMTRAC (Information Management for TRAffic Control) an on-line data base with a Google map user interface that stores information on line and making it available on site, in the office or when working at home at any time of day or night. IMTRAC now:
• covers most ITS equipment types;
• stores all kinds of technical and management information; and
• is being developed to manage fault reporting/clearance and maintenance contract management. It is anticipated this will improve performance and reduce costs.
IMTRAC is now operational in six LAs and has been used to support research project data management for two major national projects. It is now sold internationally by the TRL who are upgrading all their modeling software to allow model outputs to be held on line in IMTRAC.
If best use is to be made of existing ITS assets LAs need to know what these assets are and be able to access relevant information where and when needed. IMTRAC provides the means to do this creating an opportunity to improve network performance and reduce operating costs.
Peter has demonstrated the ability to use his IT expertise to produce solutions to ITS problems and persevered to turn an idea into a product and hence is worthy of being nominated for the Young ITS Professional.
Ends
Photos of the Award winners are available from ITS (UK) – please email mailbox@its-uk.org.uk
ENQUIRIES:
For further information, please contact:
Jennie Martin
ITS (UK) Tel:
+44(0)20 7709 3003
Email:
mailbox@its-uk.org.uk
Notes to editors:
ITS UNITED KINGDOM, the UK association for the promotion of Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS), is a not-for-profit public/private sector association financed by members' subscriptions, and provides a forum for all organisations concerned with ITS. We work to bring the benefits that ITS can offer in terms of economic efficiency, transport safety, and environmental benefits to the United Kingdom - and at the same time expand the ITS market.
The membership, over 160 UK organisations, comprises Government Departments, Local Authorities, Police Forces, consultants, manufacturing and service companies, and academic and research institutions.
Members benefit from ITS United Kingdom activities including seminars, workshops and regular news dissemination. ITS United Kingdom encourages discussion on issues such as public/private co-operation, standards, legislation, information provision and new technology.
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