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SwRI® to develop New England Advanced Transportation Management System

For immediate release

San Antonio — June 12, 2014 — Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) has been awarded a five-year, $4.1 million contract from state transportation authorities in New Hampshire, Vermont and Maine to develop a regional Advanced Transportation Management System (ATMS), Data Hub, and Traveler Information System (TIS) that will upgrade the highway information infrastructure in northern New England. The system will provide coordinated real-time traffic, safety and weather information to motorists.

The new single-platform ATMS will allow collaboration among the states’ departments of transportation and public safety agencies to relay comprehensive information to motorists as quickly as possible. The system will replace outdated technology currently in use with state-of-the-art software called ActiveITS that SwRI developed for the Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT) SunGuide® and Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) Lonestar® traffic management systems along with additional custom software.

“Advanced traffic management systems have been shown to reduce secondary collisions, mitigate congestion and, most importantly, save lives,” said Program Director Dr. Robert Heller in the Intelligent Systems Department in SwRI’s Automation and Data Systems Division. “Texas and Florida have agreed to share the software that we developed with other government entities throughout the United States, so we are able to provide a solution to New Hampshire, Vermont and Maine at greatly reduced costs.”

The SwRI-developed, cloud-based ATMS system is designed to allow regional collaboration on incident response and data-sharing of information about accidents, construction, weather and traffic flows. An Event Management Module monitors and controls Intelligent Transportation System devices, provides automated incident response scenarios to streamline notification, detection and verification of incidents, and provides a robust performance management system. A regional TIS includes a website for traveler information, and a Data Fusion Hub will help facilitate information exchange among the ATMS, the private sector, the TIS and regional partners and stakeholders.

“We have been designing and developing traffic management systems for more than 20 years,” said Director Dr. Steven W. Dellenback of SwRI’s Intelligent Systems Department. “This comprehensive, coordinated ATMS will benefit drivers in New Hampshire, Vermont and Maine with real-time, up-to-the-minute information on road conditions and will help police and fire departments and highway crews respond more quickly to traffic accidents and weather conditions.”

Design of the new system is underway, and it is expected to go online in late 2015.

For more information about SwRI’s Intelligent Transportation Systems visit its.swri.org.

For more information, contact Deb Schmid, +1 210 522 2254, Communications Department, Southwest Research Institute, 6220 Culebra Road, San Antonio, TX 78238-5166.