Product category:
Plant- and Machine-Wide Communications
News Release from: GarrettCom Europe | Subject: 6K16
Edited by the Engineeringtalk Editorial
Team on 10 February 2005
Industrial Ethernet switches set for
traffic duty
GarrettCom's unique field hardened 6K16 managed industrial Ethernet switches are being used in a novel traffic management trial on the M42 motorway in Birmingham.
The Highways Agency is an executive agency for the Department for Transport (DfT), and is charged with the responsibility for operating, maintaining and improving the UK's motorways and trunk roads In a bid to reduce congestion and increase safety on the UK's roads the Highways Agency decided to try a new approach
This article was originally published on Engineeringtalk on 7 Nov 2007 at 8.00am (UK)
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In partnership with professional services group Mouchel Parkman a strategic plan was developed to improve traffic flow within the existing infrastructure and road systems.
The project, code-named Active Traffic Management (ATM) and due to go operational in 2005, will attempt to reduce congestion by part time use of the hard shoulder, variable speed limits, increasing safety by using video data, enhance driver information about traffic flow, give more reliable journey times and respond faster to any accidents.
These objectives will be achieved via a dynamic monitoring system.
When traffic reaches a certain level and is in danger of slowing or suffering stop-start traffic jams, variable speed limits are to be introduced on electronic advanced motorway indicators (AMIs) situated on overhead gantries, with driver information relayed on variable message signs (VMSs).
If these measures are insufficient the VMS mounted above the motorway will indicate that the hard shoulder is now open as a running lane.
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In addition to these congestion and information provision improvements, safety is enhanced by the introduction of the Highways Agency Digital Enforcement Camera System (HADECS).
In an initial trial, the first digital enforcement system in UK is to be introduced to a small section of the M42 motorway in Birmingham.
Within this section safety cameras will be installed at the same locations as the VMS.
In the past, companies within the transportation technology sector have faced a problem with communications to these remote points.
Legacy communications technologies such as Synchronous Digital Hierarchy (SDH) are usually optimised for small bandwidths and prove to be too expensive and ineffective on greater bandwidth intensive applications such as video.
Mouchel Parkman therefore highlighted the need for an Internet Protocol (IP) over Ethernet based fibre network to connect the camers to a manned control room in Coleshill.
Using the cost effective Ethernet based network designed by Mouchel Parkman, GarrettCom optical switches are able to provide the necessary bandwidth, security, resilience and expandability required for the Highways Agency's application.
With millions of cars driving on the UK's roads every day the ATM is a mission critical application, so the fibre optic network required the highest standard in fault tolerance technology.
For this reason Mouchel Parkman chose GarrettCom's unique field hardened 6K16 managed industrial Ethernet switches with their S-Ring innovative redundancy manager software.
S-Ring is built on networking industry standards including IEEE802.1d Spanning Tree Protocol and it enables GarrettCom 6K16 switches to simplify and speed up recovery from faults or breakages to the network with subsecond recovery times.
Using S-Ring software the enforcement cameras can be connected over long distances with fibre at gigabit capacity in a fault tolerant ring structure.
Each section of road has a 6K16 operating as a master optical switch connecting the fibre optical ring with a transmission station.
The ring itself consists of a 96-core fibre optic cable that runs along the side of the motorway.
At each gantry the cable is spliced to a 24-core cable.
The field-hardened GarrettCom industrial Ethernet switches are used to connect the individual safety cameras to the fault tolerant fibre optical ring.
The GarrettCom 6K16 Switch was also selected because it is housed in a tough steel casing and designed for temperature uncontrolled environments, and so is ideally suited to connect the locations on the roadside.
The switches were required to have their own AC power inputs, rack mount capability, secure web management, modularity of copper, fibre and gigabit ports, as well as tag based virtual LAN (VLAN) functionality.
Due to the geographic area served being large, most of the ATM sites are located in remote areas, maintenance and repair costs can be very high, therefore it was crucial for Mouchel Parkman to provide a reliable and cost-effective solution.
The GarrettCom's switches used incorporate a secure web management function, which provides a method for the Highways Agency to remotely monitor and manage the fibre switches using a graphical user interface from any location using a web browser.
The aspect of security is also vitally important to the Government based Highways Agency.
The GarrettCom Secure Web Management software provided the perfect solution with built-in authentication and encryption for remote connections via Secure Socket Layer (SSL) and Transport Layer Security (TLS) technology.
Further security measures were required to protect the flow of data.
Because multiple services including HADECS are running over the one ATM network, there is a legal requirement to keep the data separate.
VLAN tagging is an integral part of the GarrettCom managed switch software offering the ability to subdivide a network into several virtual networks without the need for additional hardware.
This provides the perfect method of segregating the data streams.
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