Similar projects

Now we have completed the third project from the subject area "travel time display". The first project focused more on the photovoltaic system and a TLS 2012 group of functionally “system control” (FG7), with the goal of saving electricity at night times, if necessary. In the second project the transmission of large amounts of single vehicle data was an essential part of the task: A double local bus was developed for the local bus control module. This was achieved without ignoring a single specification from TLS 2012 standards, neither in the software of the local bus control module (SM) nor in that of the “communication computer isle bus" (KRI).

Experience

DÜRR has been developing TLS road station in the tunnel ramp since the early 1990s. For example in the Black Forest for the Reutherberg tunnel and in the Rems Valley for the Kappelberg tunnel. In the mid-1990s DÜRR built their first traffic control system (VBA):

• on the federal road B27 between Stuttgart-Degerloch and the Aichtal bridge,
• on the federal motorway A30 near Bad Oynhausen

The bridging from often standardized VBA to installations in the tunnel ramp makes it possible for us to cover more and more new applications. For example: ramp meter, monitoring equipment for tunnel operation technology, traffic counting stations, a bridge controller between tunnel control system and road control system, temporary hard shoulder release, redundant KRI.

In November 2018 the 250th road station with its own DÜRR controller was built. This replaced an existing road station for traffic data acquisition with double loops detector in the harsh environment of a road traffic tunnel; additional plausibility checks within individual vehicle groups was designed, for example.

Synergies

The present project comprises the installation and operation of a travel time display (RZA) on the motorway A5 before the Weil am Rhine motorway junction. Here in the Upper Rhine Rift, where the Vosges and the Black Wood are vis-à-vis, some of the most imported traffic connections in Europa are located. The display is placed close to the Isteiner thresholds, a natural swimming area with rapids in a section of the River Rhine called the Altrhein.
The travel times are calculated by a provider for two different routes between Weil am Rhein, in Germany, and the Augst junction, in Switzerland:

• The main route via the A5, N2 and N3 motorways
• Or via the A98, A861 and at last the N3

The central computer takes the travel time data and provides the customers with a cloud application. They can control the status of the display. We have used the cloud since 2018. The graphical application is inspired by the work of our partner company evon. We could once more use the full color displays of our partner company DMS, which have already been used this year to replace a display cross section on the tunnel ramp of the Heilsbergtunnel. Font spacing improves the faster capture of the travel time information. The corresponding software has already been used for some dynamic direction sign with integrated traffic jam information (dWiSta) in North Rhine-Westphalia.

The formatting of the information, for example the display of left and right-aligned text blocks on one line, was easy to achieve, because we could fall back on the MULTI - software package. DÜRR Austria already used this software for info sign in Austria. Even if only a part of the abilities is used for the daily operation of the RZA, the full range of functions for the US-American NTCIP "Markup Language for Transportation Information (MULTI)" is included.

If you have seen the system dark one day and lit up the next, the operating mode has been changed in the meantime; a function that every road station has. If you can watch our maintenance department on the A5 controlling the automatic series of pictures consisting of "All Red", "All Green" and "All Blue", you can imagine how many ideas have been collected.