Siemens brings motorway and tunnel management under control

First published in Intertraffic Innovation News - June 29, 2020

Wherever traffic regulating systems display situation-tailored warnings and speed limits, the risk of congestion and accidents diminishes. On motorways in general, and in tunnels in particular, hazard warnings, lane closures, speed limits and no-passing zones increase traffic safety and therefore decrease accident numbers. That helps traffic to run more smoothly and emissions are much lower than in stop-and go traffic, which is known to be especially polluting. In achieving these multiple benefits, intelligent traffic centres such as Siemens’ Sitraffic Varia are playing a decisive role.

Tunnels are typical bottlenecks in the road network and require special attention in terms of safety. Quite often, however, operational and traffic control functions are managed separately for motorways and tunnels. Shared tasks are implemented via interfaces – a time-consuming and expensive method. In contrast, Sitraffic Varia is a control system that integrates both fields of application. This saves money and time, improves overall functionality, and enhances road safety. A control or management centre collects and processes an enormous amount of diverse data. The transparent presentation of this constantly changing information is quite a challenge. Sometimes events cannot be satisfactorily handled by the automatic system but require immediate manual intervention.

These automatic or semi-automatic responses of the control and management centre, like a lane closure or a hazard warning, are the result of complex analyses. Sitraffic Varia is already equipped for communication with cooperative traffic systems (V2I). Siemens Mobility states that Sitraffic Varia offers optimal support for control centre operators, providing them with right information at the right time.