TrafficInfraTech Magazine Linking People Places & Progress
SWARCO an international group providing complete range of road marking, signalling and traffic management offers solutions that enable a more efficient use of existing roadway capacities, a smoother traffic flow, reduced emissions, optimal management of public transport and enhanced pedestrian safety
The integration of high quality products, powerful monitoring and control systems combined in a smart integrated solution from Swarco called OMNIA enhance traffic safety, and efficiency on city mobility with beneficial and true impacts on a number of aspects. The Omnia concept exploits Swarco’s three decades of experience gained in the fields of traffic control, transport management, mobility information service and integrated ITS architecture. All of the ITS applications offered by Swarco, in fact, have inherent features making them ideal for integration in the Omnia platform. Omnia is an open platform designed to functionally integrate and offer easy access to a wide range of ITS applications through a common interface.
Omnia is located at a higher level and provides a homogeneous access to one or more cooperating ITS applications. Each specific ITS application connected to Omnia carries out its own control and management functionalities, but is featured to cooperate with other ITS applications. The Omnia user-friendly Common GUI offers distributed measurement and supervisory facilities. It includes providing more effective and simpler monitoring of the road network and sub-system components, and simple ways of interacting with them, in order to display details about their status and send commands. Thanks to its modularity and scalability, Omnia can be successfully applied to any traffic environment. It is especially suited to large-scale systems.
In Barcelona – Public Transport: Barcelona’s public transport mainly consists of a local public transport network with bus lines, metro, tram and aerial cable cars. To reduce traffic volumes and also for environmental reasons, the city of Barcelona introduced a ‘Biking Service’, a free bicycle service which is also considered as a means of public transport. Swarco’s goal for this project was to reorganise and improve Barcelona’s extensive public transport network. The complete solution is operational since 1999. Starting in 2004, the existing system received an upgrade and it will be continuously extended. The system
comprises continuously monitored 1,100 vehicles and 110 service lines, a modern control room with 17 central operators, and a real-time passenger information system fully integrated with external systems.
In Bucharest – Adaptive Control: The significant rise of private car ownership in the city of Bucharest and its surrounding areas over the last few years has led to daily congestion. The inhabitants and the driving public are benefiting from reliable traffic information and new traffic control systems, offering an upgraded infrastructure and a better managed street network with increased efficiency, reduced travel times and positive effects for the environment. Financed with funds from the Municipality of Bucharest and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), the joint-venture of Swarco and UTI International provides an advanced integrated traffic management system for the city of Bucharest. The turnkey delivery of a new traffic control centre includes an adaptive urban traffic control and public transport management system with latest LED traffic light equipment. The complete system comprises a new traffic control centre, 140 intersections (expandable to 1,000 intersections), fully adaptive traffic control with SPOT/ UTOPIA, 140 controllers, type ITC-2, PTM system FLASH with integration of 300 vehicles and Video surveillance system (CCTV) for 140 intersections.
