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Government GIS

Australian agencies to introduce traffic management system

By Clarice Africa | 8 February 2011

NICTA and NSW Roads and Traffic Authority are embarking on a joint research agreement to develop a system that would not only improve the management of traffic incidents, but also manage the “cognitive” load of its operators.

Research group manager at NICTA, Dr. Fang Chen told FutureGov Asia Pacific that as the volume of traffic increases each year—at a rate of 5 per cent on state roads—so does the volume of workload on the Traffic Management Centre’s (TMC) operators.
According to Dr. Chen one of the major functions of the TMC, is to verify traffic incidents with the police and other external parties in order for them to clear the road as quick as possible in case of emergencies.

However, due to the increasing volume of the workload the TMC’s traffic operators are unable to handle the cognitive workload even in a 12-hour shift.

“If we don’t provide a more useful and effective system then that means more road users would have to suffer longer delays in terms of clearing the road when incidents happen,” she said.

“The aim of the joint research program is to find the most effective way of operating under high load situations and to provide adaptive solutions for operators by having better systems and better procedures to support their work.

Chen said that NICTA was trying to improve the efficiency of the system by understanding what kind of workload is being experienced on a particular timeframe, and integrating this into the system being developed with the RTA, called Cognitive Load Monitoring Technology.

“With this joint research project we can have a better and more effective system that will result in quicker traffic resolving time,” she said.

The unique monitoring technology would monitor the operator’s involuntary movements and voice and speech patterns and would be able to gauge from the aforementioned data points an operator’s capacity to manage the volume of the work load.

“This technology aims to achieve some kind of cohesive human-machine integrating system whereby the ultimate goal is to have a system that would be capable of sensing human need,” she said.

According to Dr. Chen, the joint research program for the traffic management system, which started at the end of last year, is a continuation of NICTA’s many research collaborations with RTA.

The system will be evaluated after three years, she added.

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