Smart and innovative thinking will again be awarded at the world’s largest, and best attended, trade fair for the infrastructure, traffic management, safety, parking, and smart mobility sectors, when the winners of the 2016 Intertraffic Innovation Awards are announced on 5 April during the opening ceremony. An international jury has scrutinised 91 potential candidates and after careful analysis and intense consideration has shortlisted 15 final entries that go forward. Entries were judged on originality and innovative value, practicality in terms of technical and/or economic feasibility, sustainability and design. Awards will be presented in five categories:
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The five members of the jury will reconvene just before Intertraffic Amsterdam 2016 to choose a winner in each category. One of these category winners will then be selected as the overall winner of the 2016 Intertraffic Innovation Awards and the presentations will be made during the opening ceremony of Intertraffic Amsterdam 2016.
Infrastructure Category:
Quick-Cube
The Silca Quick-Cube is a mobile light that can be used for roadworks, events and security. Because the dimensions of the unit are so small, it is possible to transport more than 30 units on one trailer. The Quick-Cube uses LED lamps and is completely self-supporting. It has a runtime of more than 60 working hours. Solar panels can be added and the nine-metre mast moves up and down hydraulically.
ADD_C
The application of an image segmentation strategy to images of transport infrastructure obtained from photogrammetry survey product allows automatic assessment of infrastructure surface degradation by means of high-speed vehicles or UAVs (drones). The extraction of regions from images acquired by DL Scan Camera and degradation maps, made by the ADD_C software for automatic recognition and classification of defects, represents an important step forward in the assessment of the maintenance process of road pavements.
Smart Ultimate Lighting
Smart Ultimate Lighting is an illuminating foil with imprinted energy storage and imprinted sensors. The foil is used on information carriers, such as illuminated signs. This innovation has two special characteristics: The illuminating layer ensures that the foil lights up and provides visibility up to 250m, while sensors in the film make sure the product is "smart" by sensing when it is dark and ensuring the foil illuminates.
Judge’s comment:
This year’s Infrastructure Category entries not only include innovations enabling existing tasks to be undertaken more efficiently and with a greater environmental focus, but also some offering radically different ways of traffic and infrastructure management. While each offers benefits for transport authorities, weighing the relative merits of each of the entries has been an interesting and challenging task and I think there are some good contenders for the overall winner. But I have yet to hear the other judges’ contenders.
Colin Sowman, Editor, ITS International, Route One Publishing, UK
Traffic Management Category:
SpeedLane
SpeedLane is a state-of-the-art true dual beam, ultra-low power, side fire radar. It is designed to accurately detect lane, speed and class of individual vehicles and compute per lane volume, occupancy, gap, average speed, 85th percentile and headway parameters. It mounts easily on a pole using stainless steel straps, and can be used for both temporary and permanent installations
OnDynamic
OnDynamic is an intelligent framework of maintenance-free Bluetooth sensors and specialised software. It can provide an innovative live automatic system calibration and is easy to install at roadsides. OnDynamic is the first multimodal system to supply real-time data concerning travel time, average section speed and traffic problems, as well as pollution, atmospheric status and road surface conditions.
Ortana Meteos 251
Without a need to install road embedded sensors, Ortana overhead non-intrusive multisensor systems with specially designed optical lenses have integrated optical, near-infrared and laser technology to identify all road conditions, including surface temperature, water film height, ice layer thickness, road status, ice percentage, freezing temperature, snow height and friction.
Judge’s comment:
Traffic management has attracted a vast amount of innovation in recent months. A host of technologies, from Bluetooth sensors to Lidar cameras, have rapidly become more streamlined and more affordable, enabling their deployment in ever wider contexts in the world of transport. The entries in the Traffic Management Category for this year’s Intertraffic Innovation Awards reflect this. Furthermore they show that, as technology reaches ever greater levels of market penetration, new ways to access and analyse data have been developed to capitalise on this growth. The amount of new hardware and software at the disposal of traffic managers is greater than ever before, resulting in a world where transport assets can be utilised with ever greater efficiency, for the benefit of society as a whole.
Tom Stone, Editor, Traffic Technology International, UKIP Media & Events, UK
Safety Category
Vehicle mounted VMS
There were 13 accidents in 2014 in the Netherlands involving supervisors’ vehicles, so increased safety in this area is certainly required. During incident management this vehicle-mounted VMS improves safety for motorists, road workers and road supervisors. All functions of the vehicle can be controlled with an app on a tablet from up to 100m away, for example from a safe zone alongside the road.
WheelRight Tyre Condition Management
WheelRight's Drive-Through Tyre Management solution measures tyre pressure, vehicle weight and the tread depth around the circumference of the tyres as a vehicle drives over road-mounted sensors. Easy to use, with no equipment to fit to the vehicle, the system measures every vehicle from day one, instantly identifying the vehicle and reporting any problems, providing savings in time, fuel, tyres, and money.
SaferTraffic Platform
The only video-based technology platform to efficiently detect and enforce all high-risk traffic and parking violations. The unified platform is modularly deployed and easily installed in a wide range of devices based on existing infrastructure. The platform is backed by a suite of easy to use applications and significantly improves road safety for pedestrians and drivers.
Judge’s comment:
There were many entries this year in the Safety Category: over 30! Apart from innovations in products that are there to improve the safety of the road user, several entries seek to improve the safety of road construction and emergency workers. This reflects the interest in preventing the often serious incidents in this field. In addition, products that make our traffic safer are increasingly smart and connected. This allows for greater efficiency and effectiveness.
Dr Peter van der Knaap (Chairman of the Jury) – MD of SWOV – Institute for Road Safety Research, The Netherlands
Parking Category
M4 Smart-Sensor System
A Park Assist camera-based M4 smart-sensor system puts processing intelligence right at the parking space level.
Smart-sensors with dual cameras are perched above the driving lane to monitor a pair of spaces on each side. This unique vantage point provides the CMOS cameras with an unobstructed view of the parked vehicles — while providing parkers with clear sight lines for easy guidance and navigation. Each individual sensor has the ability to stream surveillance video to a video management system, while also sending rich data for the integrated License Plate Recognition (LPR) and occupancy tracking.
MB multilayer parking
HR Groep, The Netherlands
The multilayer bike parking system varies from all existing systems. Major differences are that the bike will stay in a horizontal position from the floor until it is placed into his holder in the second layer, so it is easy to use for everybody. The height of the system is lower than the existing parking stands due to a unique parking system where bikes can be parked at an angle.
RingGo
Judge’s comment:
Discussions about parking move more and more from operations to accessibility of urban areas and customer information. Proper parking management and customer information help cities to reduce car traffic in central areas and to achieve environmental targets while keeping the city alive. Many entries at Intertraffic are supportive in those policies by gathering access information (i.e. routing and pricing) and actual availability of parking facilities and transfer those into guidance information to enable visitors to make the best choice for their specific visits.Peter H Martens – Member of the Advisory Council of Directors, European Parking Association (EPA) and Vexpan, The Netherlands
Smart Mobility Category
ParkNow
Parkmobile Group, The Netherlands
ParkNow, in cooperation with BMW and the Parkmobile Group, offers a premium parking experience using the car’s dashboard. ParkNow is the first company to implement paying for a parking location and reserving a parking spot using the car’s dashboard. Park, pay and reserve using in-car technology is no longer something of the future but something for today!
InVipo
InVipo is a smart integration and visualisation platform that can be defined as a middleware between on-field technology and end users. It focuses on data aggregation, monitoring, visualisation and integration in smart cities and ITS projects.
Sitraffic SiBike
Sitraffic SiBike is an infrastructure-free bike prioritisation system that uses a smartphone App. As soon as a cyclist with the smartphone App running approaches the intersection, a virtual trigger point is activated. The control centre then activates the command to give or extend the green time to traffic lights. All trigger points are purely software-based and don’t require roadside infrastructure.
Compared to the 2014 Innovation Awards there were more entries this year in the Smart Mobility category. Apart from innovations in smart mobility products there were several entries in the upcoming IoT (Internet of Things) area. This reflects the interest in taking ITS to the next level of automation and scaling opportunities that we know from the internet world. Making products smart, allowing them to connect to the internet allows for greater efficiency for authorities and easy use for citizens on either traffic flow solutions, or ease of use and increasing travel comfort.
Dr. Ir. B.J.C.M. (Ben) Rutten, Program Manager, Strategic Area Smart Mobility Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands
