To relieve the severity of the notorious Bangkok traffic jams - especially during rush hours - Siemens Limited has looked for the possibility of introduce its traffic management technology to enable traffic problems to be tracked and solved on the spot without the need for human intervention.

The idea of the technology is to make it possible for traffic control boxes at intersections to get information about the traffic flow in real time and act according to the situation.

Gilles Weber, vice president of Siemens Limited's Industrial Solutions and Services, said that to feed the traffic control box with car information, it is necessary to cut into the road surface and insert an induction loop.

As the device works like a car detector, it creates a current any time a car passes over it before sending the information to the centre where software named Scoot (Split Cycle Offset Optimisation Technique) is waiting to optimise traffic signals to minimise stops and delays. The software is adaptive and responds automatically to traffic fluctuations.

It obtains information on traffic flow from detectors. When a vehicle passes the detector, Scoot converts the information into a "link profile unit", a hybrid of link flow and occupancy. With this information, the system will determine which side should get the green light.

"With this, the police don't need to stay in the booth all the time. They will have more time to go into the street and manage traffic violators," he said.

To enable the system to accurately calculate the number of cars, two loop controls are required per road. This, however, depends also on the decision of traffic engineers who determine the best place to install the equipment.

They have to configure the software to work according to the unique behaviour at each intersection.

Apart from the traffic management system, Weber said the company also aims to introduce the intelligent car park system into Thailand.

Aiming to make the life of the city's drivers easier when they look for space to park the car, the company plans to introduce what it calls the new generation guidance system for multi-storey car parks. The system's individual parking place monitoring function provides complete transparency with regard to which and how many parking spaces are occupied at any particular time, irrespective of the size of a building.

To know exactly which parking space is free in real time, he said an ultrasound sensor would be installed above every parking space in multi-storey car parks to reliably detect whether the parking space is occupied or not.

This information will be transmitted to the central parking space management system, informing the operator about how many and which spaces are free at any given moment. This eases the management task and optimises capacity utilisation, while reducing the time spent by the driver looking for a space.

As soon as a vehicle passes through the car park entrance the guidance system directs the driver reliably along the shortest route to the next unoccupied parking space.

Aside from individual space monitoring, the system will also include zone and aisle counting. This means that any vehicles still en route to a parking space are also acquired by the system which avoids guiding too many drivers into a sector that only contained a few unoccupied spaces when the car entered the car park.

The system is being installed at seven airports, with Dusseldorf, Cologne/Bonn and Toulouse being amongst them.

suchalee@nationgroup.com

Suchalee Pongprasert

The Nation