An action for Co-ordinated Road Traffic Management Implementation in northern Europe

VIKING Monitoring
Guidelines 2005

Version 0.9February 2006

1

VIKING Monitoring Guidelines 2005 Ver 0.9 01/02/06

Document Information

Document:Euro-Regional Project VIKING – MIP

VIKING Monitoring Guidelines 2005

Date of issue:02/01/2006

Authors:Risto Kulmala

Timo Karhumäki

VTT Communities and Infrastructure / Transport Research

Box 1902

FIN-02044 VTT

Contributors:Peter Philipps (DE)

Lars Jørgensen (DK)

Sami Luoma (FI)

Håkon Wold, Kjersti Boag (NO)

Bjarne Holmgren, Urban Stenberg (SE)

Status:0.9

File:VTT ROK:

C:\data\tiel\VIKING\Monitoring\Guidelines\VIKING_MIP2005_D1_0_Monitoring Guidelines 2005 v 0_9.doc

Document history:

VersionDateDistribution

Ver 0.12005-04-28MACC

Ver 0.22005-08-26MACC

Ver 0.32005-08-30MACC

Ver 0.42005-10-05MACC

Ver 0.52005-11-23

Ver 0.62005-12-28MACC

Ver 0.72005-12-29MACC

Ver 0.82006-01-18MACC

Ver 0.92006-02-01MACC

Executive summary

The objective of the guidelines is to provide common monitoring guidelines for the VIKING area for the purpose of producing relevant, harmonised and consistent monitoring information for the VIKING traffic management services and systems.

The guidelines will build on the TELTEN-2 guidelines, existing national guidelines and those developed within the VIKING actions, and the VIKING Monitoring State of the Art reports.

During Phase 2 of the VIKING action, the structure of the guidelines was developed. In Phase 3, VIKING produced the first version of the VIKING Monitoring Guidelines.

Throughout its life span VIKING has participated actively in the cross-fertilisation activities initiated by DG-TREN. This work has occurred primarily within the Euroregional Monitoring Expert Group. The results of the Expert Group have been utilised in the annual development of the VIKING monitoring guidelines.

Development of guidelines for monitoring is a slow and long process, requiring consensus formation in its various steps. The VIKING Monitoring Guidelines contains now a set of validated common minimum quality requirements for:

  • cross-section traffic information
  • incident information
  • road weather and road surface condition information

These have been selected as the starting points because of the long experience from their use as well as their relevance for the common VIKING traffic management services, the TIC services and RDS-TMC.

The guidelines also include discussion on monitoring for travel time estimation and local climate models, which both currently lack the maturity required for establishing their quality level recommendations in VIKING. The guidelines contain a description of maintenance procedures for monitoring infrastructure, and as the newest addition, discussion of quality issues for air quality and individual speed monitoring.

The guidelines development work is to be further continued in VIKING MIP, in close co-operation with the other VIKING domains and other Euroregional projects.

Table of contents

Executive summary

Table of contents

1.Introduction

1.1Purpose and scope of the report

1.2Existing guidelines

2.Monitoring for traffic management

3.Operating environments for traffic management

4.Monitoring requirements

5.Proposal for recommended quality levels

5.1Introduction

5.2Cross-section traffic information

5.3Incident information

5.4Road weather and road surface condition information

6.Assessment and recommendations

7.References

Appendix 1: Travel time estimation……………………..…………………...…45

Appendix 2: Local Climate Models ……....……………….…...…………...…. 51

Appendix 3: Maintenance of monitoring infrastructure...... ………………...… 61

Appendix 5: Air quality monitoring……..…...…………....………………...….75

Appendix 4: Individual speed monitoring………………....………………...…. 81

Appendix 6: National Guidelines for Traffic Management..………………...….83

1.Introduction

1.1Purpose and scope of the report

The objective of the action is to provide common monitoring guidelines for the VIKING area. These guidelines are necessary as VIKING aims at implementing harmonised traffic management systems and services on the VIKING road network. Without a harmonised information infrastructure platform (monitoring and information management), the task of provision of harmonised services is surely very difficult. The ultimate aim of monitoring is to produce relevant, harmonised and consistent monitoring information for VIKING traffic management services and systems. The monitoring guidelines should be an instrument to ensure that this aim will be reached.

The importance of monitoring guidelines was also highlighted by the Euroregional Expert Group on Monitoring in 1999. This group involved experts of all Euroregional projects (ARTS, CENTRICO, CORVETTE, SERTI and VIKING) as well as DG-TREN of the European Commission and the ASSISTEN-T project. In their recommendations, the Expert Group stated the following: “The E-R projects should achieve harmonised quality levels for service operation in terms of the related monitoring functionality in order to guarantee not only common quality levels within a E-R Project (obviously already on the way), but also between such projects, in particular, if the continuity of a service has to be guaranteed in cross-border regions.” In addition, the group also stated that ”The E-R Projects should aim at the development and validation of recommendations – or non-mandatory guidelines, MoU, etc. – on quality levels for Monitoring systems as a kind of European-wide minimum information level.” (Kulmala, Philipps & Morello 1999). During the Multi-Annual Indicative Program (MIP) of the TEN-T, the group has continued its work involving STREETWISE and CONNECT as new Euroregional projects.

The guidelines are mainly built on the national experiences from implementation of traffic management and information systems and related monitoring systems, which in turn have resulted in a number of national guidelines or similar reports. Where possible, the development of guidelines utilises existing guidelines, of which the TELTEN-2 guidelines are the most important because of their European dimension. Also national guidelines or guidelines type documents relating to monitoring exist in Denmark (Vejdirektoratet 1998b), Finland (Tiehallinto 2001a), Norway (Vejdirektoratet 1997, 1998a) and Sweden (Vägverket 1999a-f). These national guidelines will be more elaborated upon in subchapter 1.2.

The guidelines will be later used for developing the VIKING Monitoring Plan. The development of the Monitoring Plan will also utilise the VIKING Monitoring State of the Art reports, which show the current status of monitoring on the VIKING road network. By comparing the current status to the status aimed for (as described by the Guidelines), the parts of the road network with insufficient monitoring can be easily identified. This is also in line with the recommendations of the Euroregional Expert Group.

The Guidelines development process builds upon the operating environment approach as proposed by the TELTEN action. According to this approach, we determine the various traffic management functions or rather the traffic management services to be provided in the various operating environments. These services each have their specific requirements with regard to the type and quality of monitoring information. By combining these requirements for the various operating environments, we can determine the minimum requirements for monitoring in the various operating environments.

This approach was used first in the VIKING Monitoring Guidelines 1999 (Kulmala & Luoma 2000) for traffic monitoring with the help of fixed monitoring stations and incident detection. These were selected as the starting points because of the long experience from their use as well as their relevance for the common VIKING traffic management services , the TIC services and RDS-TMC.

The common VIKING traffic management services were the basic starting point in the Guidelines development process, and therefore the monitoring requirements were discussed at length with the VIKING Project Area 4 “Traffic Management Services”. These discussions revealed that no specific requirements for monitoring had been set by the Project Area 4, but the approach adopted by us was accepted (Luoma 1999). During VIKING Phase 4, the monitoring requirements of traffic management and control services was under special consideration. A specific workshop (Kulmala, Luoma & Wuolijoki 2000), organised in co-operation with VIKING Domain 3, analysed the monitoring requirements of these services and validated the existing VIKING Monitoring Guidelines.

The development of guidelines for monitoring is a slow process. The slowness is mainly due to the necessity of reaching a consensus on the various aspects related to the quality requirements for monitoring. Each country and actor has its own requirements, which are closely related to the specific uses of the monitoring information. The VIKING action as a whole aims at harmonising traffic management in its area, and hence, also at harmonising the monitoring requirements, too. The Monitoring Guidelines 1999 presented the first step in this direction. This step was followed by national consultation processes aiming at the validation of the Guidelines. In addition, the application area of the Guidelines has been now widened to cover road weather and road surface condition monitoring as well as local climate models and monitoring for travel time estimation. Now, in VIKING MIP 2004 maintenance of monitoring infrastructure has been included in the Guidelines.

1.2Existing guidelines

On the European level, the TELTEN 2 Guidelines (ERTICO 1997) are the only comprehensive guidelines on monitoring currently existing. These guidelines are widely accepted but, unfortunately, not actually adopted in practice for time being. The guidelines have, however, been utilised in the development of monitoring guidelines and plans. The Euroregional Expert Group on Monitoring, e.g., noted that all Euroregional projects had applied the TELTEN 2 Guidelines with regard to Monitoring, although the guidelines have not always been adhered to exactly. Differences between Euroregional Projects exist in fact in classifying the TERN according to the slightly different quality levels for Monitoring (Kulmala, Philipps & Morello 1999):

-CORVETTE has applied the TELTEN 2 Guidelines.

-CENTRICO has modified/simplified the TELTEN 2 Guidelines using three self-defined levels of quality.

-SERTI has a good quality of monitoring though developed independently; in the near future some regions of SERTI will pursue a more homogeneous level of quality as result of traffic management and information system.

-VIKING follows the TELTEN 2 Guidelines but has supplemented new operating environments mainly for the dominating two-lane roads in the Nordic countries.

-ARTS is still facing a study phase before applying levels of quality for Monitoring.

-STREETWISE applies the Highways Agency TCC requirements for traffic data as their guidelines.

The operating environment based approach applied in the TELTEN 2 guidelines has been adopted throughout the Euroregional projects. This is the case also in VIKING, and the operating environments will be discussed in further detail in Chapter 3.

As traffic management and in general, Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) have advanced in the VIKING countries, the need for traffic and road weather monitoring systems has been increasing. As with any other systems widely implemented by the road authorities, the road authorities have at the same time realised their need for guidelines on traffic management systems, and the related monitoring systems.

In Denmark, the emphasis has been first on traffic monitoring on the motorway network. The Danish Road Directorate produced guidelines for loop detection stations on the motorway network (Vejdirektoratet 1998b). The guidelines set quality levels for the data collection with loops detection systems. These guidelines are quite pragmatic and can be directly applied by local road authority officials in tendering for and implementing loop-based traffic monitoring systems.

In Finland, guidelines related actions have included a pre-study on monitoring (Tielaitos 1996), and exploration of the concept of road transport system efficiency for the purposes of traffic management and road authority policy measures, in general (Luoma 1998). This work has led to the definition of efficiency quality levels for goods transports in terms of travel time predictability with obvious relevance for traffic and travel time monitoring (Jaatinen & Luoma 1999). In addition, the harmonisation of data collection processes has led to the development of software to be used by all regional offices of the Finnish National Road Administration (Finnra) for data collection from road weather stations, road weather CCTV stations, and probe vehicles to the road weather information system of Finnra. The traffic management policy of Finnra (Finnra 2001, Tiehallinto 2001c) defined quality levels for the various traffic management services provided by Finnra as well as their monitoring information requirements. The national feasibility study on traffic monitoring (Tiehallinto 2001a) determined specific quality requirements for traffic monitoring information. Both of the last-mentioned national guidelines utilised the VIKING Monitoring Guidelines 1999. A list of Finnish documents related to monitoring quality requirements is given in Appendix 3.

The VIKING road network in the northern part of Germany, respectively the five “Länder” (States) Hamburg, Schleswig-Holstein, Niedersachsen, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Bremen, consists of “Bundesautobahnen” (Federal motorways) and “Bundesstraßen” (Federal principal truck roads). Federal authorities are responsible for planning, construction and operation although a lot of the tasks are given to regional “Länder” (States) administrations to deal with on behalf or in order of the federal authorities (“Auftragsverwaltung”). Developing and implementing guidelines for such tasks is clearly dedicated to federal bodies i.e. the Ministry of Transport or associated organisations. This is true for traffic monitoring aspects, e.g. for guidelines and standards, as well.

“Monitoring Guidelines” as such do not exist in Germany. But several recommendations, advices and guidelines (“Empfehlungen, Hinweise, Richtlinien”) have been developed in which several or most of the relevant monitoring aspects and issues are addressed. Mainly, such guidelines have been defined in association with motorway traffic control systems or elements for which “monitoring”, ie. data collection and processing, is needed.

The terms of references for the supply of outstations on motorways (BMVBW f) contain requirements for data collection and distribution as to be used for motorway traffic control systems (using eg. VMS systems). It also addresses functional requirements for such data collection and distribution tools and control models as well. Furthermore, requirements on technical structures and operation of out stations, interfaces and transmission procedures are described.

The guidelines for Variable Message Sign (VMS) Systems on federal motorways (BMVBW d) describe VMS systems for traffic control purposes on motorway networks, sections, interchanges/junctions and on special spots, and in particular, the related data collection. Data collection requirements for special purposes (statistics, ice warning, speed measuring etc.) are addressed as well. Functionalities and technologies to be used for data collection and aggregation are described besides a lot of other elements of VMS systems including the control centre.

The exemplary guidelines for the planning of traffic control systems (BMVBW c) provide an example for designing and planning all elements of motorway traffic control systems including an example structure for the descriptions of all elements to be incorporated (incl. data collection), and master drawings/maps on how to submit such a planning of traffic control systems for approval by the Federal Ministry. Further guidelines exist (BMVBW a, b and e) but they deal more with the functional and technical aspects of the control and data processing equipment itself.

In Norway, the guidelines work has also started in the domain of traffic monitoring. The first proposal for determining the need for traffic monitoring stations applied operating environments (not specified exactly as such, but used in an analogous manner) based on road category, traffic volumes, and accident rates (Vejdirektoratet 1997, 1998a). The preliminary guidelines for traffic monitoring have been sent for hearing and they have received many critical comments. The official guidelines have not yet been produced.

In Sweden, a proposal for applying TELTEN 2 has been drafted (Sundberg & Hageback 1998). No actual comprehensive guidelines have been developed so far, but a number of recommendations for implementing traffic management systems exist. These recommendations deal with:

  • Traffic state and flows (Vägverket 1999f),
  • National plan for ITS (Vägverket 1999b), and
  • Guidelines for Traffic information Centres (Vägverket 1999a).

In addition, the Swedish National Road Administration is in the process of harmonising the use of climate models for winter maintenance and other related activities such as road weather monitoring. Also in Sweden, some regional strategies have included guidelines elements in them (Vägverket 1999c-e). A list of Swedish documents related to quality requirements for monitoring can be found in Appendix 3.

The VIKING monitoring guidelines build on the principles of the TELTEN 2 Guidelines but not apply exactly the quality levels as proposed by the TELTEN 2 Guidelines. This is mostly due to the fact that the operating environments of TELTEN 2 were inadequate, especially to the northern parts of the VIKING road network.

With regard to the national guidelines in existence, the VIKING guidelines will mostly deal with the domain on a more general level than the existing national guidelines. The national guidelines are often system type specific, and penetrating the implementation of these systems to quite fine detail. The VIKING Guidelines, however, will remain on the levels of information type and information quality requirements of the traffic management services as operated on the VIKING road network. In this way, the VIKING Guidelines will provide a framework or platform, on which the more detailed guidelines can be linked to.

On the European level, a paper discussing the data quality issues in Euroregional projects is currently being prepared (Euroregional Monitoring Expert Group 2005). The VIKING Monitoring Guidelines is used as one background document for this paper.

2.Monitoring for traffic management

According to the Road Transport Informatics Terminology Dictionary of the Nordic Road Association, monitoring means “Data collection and status assessment of a phenomenon” (NVF 2002). Figure 1 presents the main components of provision of traffic management services, and the position of monitoring within those components.