Irish middleware player Iona has secured a deal with Dublin City Council whereby its software will be used to collate and manage citywide traffic information to enable real-time route planning and management for the new Luas light rail transit system as it passes through Dublin’s notoriously congested streets.
Under the terms of the deal, Iona will deploy its CORBA distributed computing platform Orbix to provide Dublin City Council with a flexible service-oriented integration platform. The platform will interface with the City Council’s existing traffic management system which is based on SCATS, the Sydney Coordinated Adaptive Traffic System, to provide real-time traffic status information to a variety of devices located at central and remote traffic control and monitoring centres.
Using the system, traffic controllers can respond quickly to changing traffic conditions and ensure a smooth operation of Luas and an efficient flow of traffic at network intersections.
The new system is part of a larger integrated transportation strategy, which is being introduced to improve accessibility to and from the Greater Dublin Area. The strategy involves improvement in the quality and availability of public transport systems to reduce the need for private transport and achieve an overall reduction in traffic congestion. The first phase of a citywide intelligent traffic management system is now in place and ready for deployment when the LUAS comes online in summer.
With wider rollout of the integrated transportation strategy for the Greater Dublin Area in progress, Dublin City Council will be looking to extend this system to incorporate the city’s Quality Bus Corridor (QBC) routes and future traffic management requirements.
Brendan O’Brien, head of technical services at Dublin City Council, said that Orbix: “met all our requirements for an enterprise compliant platform, excellent notification functionality and feature-rich development environment. We’re confident that Orbix will provide an integration framework to manage our ongoing traffic management needs.”
“Metropolitan traffic management is a very complex problem for municipal IT organisations,” said Chris Horn, Iona’s CEO. “Automated traffic control systems have severe real-time requirements that demand that extremely large volumes of data pass efficiently to and from a heterogeneous mix of software and equipment.”
By John Kennedy
