Online sites:

Attiki Odos

Southampton

Winchester

Offline sites:

Barcelona

Munich

Thessaloniki

Project Description

OBJECTIVES

The objectives of PRIME are to develop innovative methods to increase the effectiveness of incident management policies and increase road safety. These will include:

1. Methods for predicting incidents or congestion in real time, which can activate traffic management strategies to reduce the likelihood of incidents.
2. Methods to improve systems for sensing incidents (sensing hardware or scene analysis).
3. Methods to improve the integration of incident verification procedures into overall incident management strategies.
4. Methods to integrate aspects of motorway and urban-network incident management strategies to increase their effectiveness.

These methods will integrate fixed road infrastructure technologies such as machine vision hardware and VMS with portable devices (GSM, GPS). They will be based on widely available communications and positioning mechanisms, and media-independent open architectures utilising mobile network intelligence for optimal use in transport.

Simulation tests will determine possible conflicts between old and improved traffic management policies. These will focus on the capabilities of intelligent techniques, and on the effective use of new information, (prediction and verification) that were not previously available. Technical and institutional barriers to integration will be identified and the system evaluation will assess the performance, cost-effectiveness and interoperability of the new methods designed. This will be achieved with the adaptation of data and conditions from three main EU sites (Munich, Southampton and Thessaloniki) with transferability examined at Athens and Barcelona.

DESCRIPTION OF THE WORK

• Incident/congestion prediction models will be developed to predict the probability of incidents/congestion in real time.
• The prediction models would be able to activate traffic management and control strategies to reduce the likelihood of congestion and incidents before they occur.
• Improving the integration of incident verification messages into the overall management strategy, (particularly those from cellular phones) will be attempted.
• The potential for integrating incident management strategies previously designed for either urban networks or motorways will also be investigated.

Project Participants