SETTING BENCHMARK: HTMS on Outer Ring Road, Hyderabad

Traffic control centre:

The Traffic Control Centre (TCC) will be the nerve centre of the HTMS system. The TCC will consist of a control room that will be manned 24×7. The set-up of the TCC is currently underway in a dedicated building adjacent to the ORR in Nanakramaguda. All staff responsible for the HTMS and TMS will be based out of the TCC, with a control room dedicated for the HTMS system. All the servers, workstations, peripheral hardware and communication equipment required for the HTMS system will be hosted in the TCC building. The control room will house workstations for all the sub-systems of HTMS listed above, as well as the central HTMS software interface. The control room will have a video wall in addition to the work stations. The video wall will be used to view the display feed
from CCTV cameras, HTMS software or the sub-system workstations as per operational requirements.

As the TCC is a critical part of the HTMS infrastructure, the entire TCC setup is being replicated at the TCC sub-centre at Ghatkesar, on the other side of ORR, which would act as the Disaster Recovery Centre.

Supporting Elements

To make HTMS functional, the TCC should have a means to communicate with all the field equipment. A dedicated redundant optical fibre network is being created to allow TCP/ IP based communication. The fibre optic network is designed in such a way that a single breakage of fibre will not affect the communication to field equipment. In addition, a network monitoring component is being deployed that will continuously monitor switches, routers and field equipment. Alerts would be generated at the TCC when any outage of any component is detected, thereby enabling the TCC staff alert the relevant staff to fix those issues. This will result in a reliable, high-availability HTMS system.

Highlights

The HTMS was designed by a consultancy firm with international experience. The solution specifications were detailed out, taking into account the operational parameters of the ORR, rather than going by the NHAI guidelines. Similarly, the process of determining the device locations followed the best practices elsewhere. Since the specifications and device placement guidelines were not entirely as per NHAI standards, an independent team of industry experts vetted the specifications and designs. For example, the VMS boards are located between advance directional signboards 2km upstream of intersections and directional signboards located 1km upstream of intersections. This is to ensure that dynamic route guidance information provided on the VMS will be taken in the context of route choice options available at the interchanges. It would also provide commuters adequate time to weigh the route choice options and make a decision before reaching the interchange.

We believe that the level of detail that went into the specifications and the design of the HTMS is far higher than what is typically the norm in India. We hope to not only showcase the HTMS system on Hyderabad ORR as one of the best in India, but also provide a benchmark for others to specify and design HTMS for their highways and expressways.