ATCS for effective signaling cycle

The CoSiCoSt based ATCS Control Room application software is designed to cater for heterogeneous traffic with no lane discipline – a characteristic of all Indian cities. Our ATCS software is backed by IITs and the IPR of CoSiCoSt lies with Government of India. Thus, our ATCS solution – WiTraC and CoSiCoSt software is a cost-effective solution designed to help the city administration and civic agencies for efficient Traffic Management.

With the announcement of Smart Cities Mission programme and allocation of funds by Government of India in 2015, a major thrust was given to development of Urban transport infrastructure. Envoys being a manufacturer, supplier, implementer and system integrator of ITS sub-systems and HTMS in India since 1968, was quick to align itself for the market requirements and was the first company to have been awarded the first contract for supply, implementation and operations of Adaptive Traffic Control System(ATCS) at 58 Junctions in Bhubaneswar City under Smart Cities Mission programme of Government of India. Incidentally, Bhubaneswar had topped among the first batch of 20 Smart Cities that were selected to be developed as Smart City.

BIn order to meet the Smart City requirements, in addition to our own products/solutions such as Road Traffic Signaling System and Variable Message Signs(VMS), we are tying-up with OEMs of Red-light/Speed Violation Detection System, Incident detection System, Parking Management System and CCTV based Junction Surveillance System and would like to establish ourselves as one of the major solution providers and System Integrators in the field of ITS and HTMS.

Dr Rajesh Krishnan,
CEO, ITS Planners & Engineers Pvt Ltd

ATCS has not been fully utilised by users in India. The reasons for this are manifold as we do not have a history of using traffic engineering knowledge and ITS technologies. Traffic signals in most Indian cities are fixed time and signal timings are not scientifically optimised in most cases. Hence, traffic policemen on the ground take manual control of signals during rush hours.

I feel that this practice has created a general feeling that ATCS technologies will not be effective under Indian conditions. There is some factual basis for such a mindset. Most ATCS systems developed abroad use delay estimation models assuming lane discipline and limited variability amongst vehicle speeds.

We have vehicles of different sizes on our roads travelling at different speeds, and such models are not transferrable to the Indian context. Also, the detection technologies that provide inputs to the delay models are also developed for homogeneous traffic with lane discipline. Hence, we either need extremely simple and practical systems where signal timings respond to changes in traffic patterns using some form of congestion measure obtained from cost effective sensors; some colleagues in the industry have made considerable progress in this direction. Though we have no way of knowing whether such systems are performing near optimum, they are better than fixed time signals.

I also see no appetite from the user community for experimentation and for trying out new approaches and this severely limits innovation in this area; this has to change.

Our ATCS is currently under development. It will be a twotiered system with strategic and tactical traffic control layers. We have brought in some innovation through out-of-the-box thinking in our ATCS, and we will announce it to the market when we feel that it is fully ready.

Talking about challenges, we do lack national ITS standards and this poses integration issues. ATCS tenders that have been published so far specify one of the widely used international standards; I remember seeing OCIT (German) and NTCIP (US) standards. We should either adopt a robust standard that is used internationally or come up with our own quickly. Beyond the low-level concerns about standards and interoperability, we also need to develop joined-up thinking about overall mobility.

ATCS should not be designed and operated on its own. The ITS eco-system should concern itself with the door-to-door mobility of people and goods and all ITS sub-systems including ATCS should be designed and operated in a coordinated fashion. Our challenge & opportunity is to get this right as we build our smart cities. We plan to continue to innovate, which is our key strength, and bring our innovations to the market directly and through our partners.