The Costa Mesa NTCIP Proxy Server Install…
The City of Costa Mesa in California runs an old Multisonics VMS 300 adaptive traffic control system on approximately 120 traffic intersections. They are very happy with this system, but wanted a modern traffic control system to allow them to integrate CALTRANS arterial controllers, and adjacent controllers at the city boundaries. A couple of years ago, they awarded a contract to Telvent-Farradyne to supply the MIST control system.
Initial efforts to integrate the systems proved difficult, for a number of reasons. Televent Farradyne decided that a proposal from Intelligent Devices to use the IDI NTCIP Proxy Server application mase sense. This would expose an NTCIP interface for all 120 intersections that would support being polled once per second for all real time intersection data, using NTCIP Dynamic Objects.
Intelligent Devices went to work:
- IDI wrote a driver for the VMS 330 to the NTCIP proxy Server. This driver extracted the VMS real time intersection data, and made it available in NTCIP format.
- IDI traveled to Costa Mesa, CA., and installed the driver, the NTCIP Proxy Server, and tested the Dynamic Objects using Device Tester for NTCIP.
- IDI supported the Televent staff in integrating MIST, and as a result of using an NTCIP standard interface, Televent did not have to write any site-specific driver code into MIST.
The most remarkable aspect of this contract was the speed of completion. Just three short weeks from the time of order to the time of acceptance sign off on siteby Telvent Farradyne.
“Thank you so much for the job well done and completion of the software in such a short time…” said Farhad Pooran, Director of Systems Engineering at Telvent Farradyne
“It’s running like a champ…” said Paul Hill, the on site Televent Farradyne Project Manager.
It just goes to show how well NTCIP works, and how the standards can be applied in innovative ways to solve integration problems. |
