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Driving command and control for safer roads
SunGard’s DS2000 Integrated Communication Control System coupled with its NSPIS Command and Control system has been central in helping the Highways Agency deliver on its commitment to the public to provide safer roads, more reliable journey times and better informed drivers. The BAPCO Journal reports...
As an executive agency of the UK Government’s Department of Transport the Highways Agency’s main responsibility used to be for the construction and maintenance of England’s motorway and major trunk road network. In Spring 2004, Highways Agency Traffic Officers began working alongside police on motorways in the West Midlands. This was the start of an England-wide roll out, with traffic officers being introduced across the whole country by the end of 2006.
In general any incident on the network, provided injury or criminality is not involved, is now managed by the Agency, from the clearing of carriageway debris to responding to motorists’ calls from the emergency roadside telephone system and this in turn enables the regional police forces to improve their effectiveness by allowing them to concentrate more of their effort on criminal activity. As a result HA needed to recruit and train new front-line Traffic Officers to patrol the network as well as procure the police style front-office systems that would allow them to deal with calls from the public, dispatch resources, maintain firm control as incidents develop and communicate effectively with the traditional emergency services on a national basis.
Solution description
The Agency signed up to the national ‘Airwave’ TETRA public safety radio service and opted to set up a network of seven Regional Control Centres across England in order to manage the new on-road teams of Traffic Officers.
SunGard was selected to supply the RCCs with its integrated emergency service control room technology as the solution that would best meet both operational requirements and minimise the technical risk of what needed to be a very aggressive roll-out.
Ian Chalmers, HA’s National RCC Technology Team Leader based in Bristol, England commented “We chose SunGard’s technology as their track record gave us a high degree of confidence that they could deliver the required proven, integrated systems against our very demanding schedule”
The solution delivered is centred around SunGard’s DS2000 Integrated Communication Control System coupled with its NSPIS Command and Control system and provides around 120 nationally distributed RCC agent positions access to TETRA radio, telephony and incident management resources on a single multi-screen PC platform. This core delivery was supplemented with SunGard’s radio Managed Service package providing procurement, configuration, installation and on-going management of around 500 hand-held, mobile and fixed mobile TETRA terminals as well as an Automated Vehicle Location system delivering real time and historical tracking of the Agency’s response vehicle fleet.
A 5-year maintenance contract for the support of all of the delivered systems was also awarded to SunGard based on its in-depth understanding of the all of the relevant technologies and nationwide field-service coverage.
Use of the system
The SunGard systems delivered to the Agency’s RCCs and Traffic Officers provide the backbone of its operational capability.
The RCC is alerted to an incident either via Traffic Officers using TETRA radios or by members of the public using mobile or Emergency Roadside telephones; in each case it is the ICCS system that presents the call to an RCC agent. From this point on the agent enters all relevant information into the C&C system and manages the incident efficiently by using details of available resources and their location relative to the incident held within that same system. The appropriate Agency resources can then be mobilised by radio and assistance can be requested rapidly from third parties such as police, ambulance, fire and rescue and vehicle recovery services as appropriate using the rich functionality of the DS2000.
Solution detail
In order to provide the required resilience, two DS2000 ICCS audio switches were delivered, one to a central equipment site in the Midlands handling the four RCCs in the centre and South of the country with the second situated in the North-West serving the three Northern RCCs. Both switches interface with the Airwave network and the Agency’s PABX system for delivery of radio and telephony traffic and associated information to RCC based agents over a SunGard designed and configured Ethernet combined VOIP and data network. Additionally centralised recording and call logging facilities were implemented to ensure all audio traffic can be recovered for audit, evidential and training purposes.
Two high resilience Sun Solaris / Oracle8 servers operating as a main and standby pair distributed across the two central equipment sites were used to host SunGard’s NSPIS C&C software.
The servers are equipped with dual redundant disc arrays and synchronise in real–time over the Ethernet data network to ensure near 100% availability. Connectivity to other government agencies via the UK Criminal Justice Extranet is built in to the C&C solution ready for planned exchange of incident data with the police and use of the Police National Computer for vehicle checks.
Powerful in-vehicle GPS equipped data loggers, upgradeable to full mobile data capability, were fitted in over 150 vehicles to provide the foundation of the AVL solution. Parameters including vehicle location, speed and heading are logged locally approximately once a second and forwarded regularly over Airwave to the ICCS system. A new AVL database was designed to capture and archive all the ‘over-the-air’ AVL updates and an associated query application was developed to give the Agency the capability of plotting historical vehicle movements derived from either the database or more the granular in-vehicle logs.
The ICCS, C&C and AVL systems are fully integrated using the SunGard developed xml Tetra Radio Location Interface, which forwards vehicle location updates received over Airwave to the C&C’s GIS system for real time map based display of resource location, and the Tetra Radio System Interface which automatically updates incidents with resource status, talkgroup affiliation and short data messages.
Benefits
The ‘one-stop-shop’ approach offered by SunGard and adopted by the Agency allowed the core systems to be delivered in under 12 months from contract award to ‘go-live’, with in-RCC agent training facilities provided in just over five months, thus allowing Traffic Officer service roll-out to meet the very demanding timescales for delivery of real benefits to the travelling public as set by central government. Continuity of service is assured by the high availability and resilience built into the design of all critical components of the systems plus the provision of fallback facilities should one RCC need to assume the duties of another due, for instance, to a control room evacuation, with all elements further underpinned by 24/7 maintenance cover. The integrated nature of the solution and presentation via a single desktop PC eliminates the need for manual transfer of data between systems, ensuring maximum agent efficiency.
Conclusions
From providing day-to-day operational command, control and communication facilities for the new RCCs and Traffic Officers to supplying the back-office data systems needed to drive continuous improvement of the service, SunGard know-how, equipment and software has been central in helping the Highways Agency deliver on its commitment to the public to provide “safer roads, more reliable journey times and better informed drivers”.
