Although there are numerous examples of innovative ITS projects in the Middle East, few are as impressive as the recently opened Sheikh Zayed Tunnel in Abu Dhabi. Spanning 3.6km in total, including a 2.4km covered section, the bi-directional (four lanes in each Part of a wider, US$816.8 million infrastructure project, the Sheikh Zayed Tunnel runs 15m underground below
the UAE capital and is expected to be a huge tool in the fight to ease the
city’s congestion woes. Commenting he importance of this huge new
construction in the wider picture, the Director General of the Municipality of
Abu Dhabi, Jumma Al Junaibi, explains that “the project is vital for the capital’s evelopment plans in the long term as it aims to cope with the expected increase in the population and traffic.”direction) structure is the Middle East’s longest road tunnel. The tunnel opened to the public The overall goal of the Sheikh Zayed Tunnel is to reduce congestion, but
the most critical priority for day-to-day operations is not simply to get traffic
from A to B smoothly; it’s to do so safely. And to achieve this goal means knowing
exactly what’s happening in the tunnel at all times. The quicker an incident is picked up by tunnel managers, the quicker it can be dealt with. FLIR’s AID solutions are known across the world for the immense value they bring to tunnel, highway and bridge operators. The company’s products have saved countless lives by enabling operators to manage incidents quickly and to prevent them escalating further. For this particular project, the on December 5, 2012. company was tasked with providing technology both for incident detection and traffic management.
Automatic Incident Detection (AID) On the incident detection side, FLIR
Intelligent Transportation Systems delivered 174 of its advanced video
servers with integrated AID capabilities for the Video Incident Detection System (VIDS) component of the project. In short, these sophisticated encoders have FLIR’s field-proven algorithms on board to pick up on any unusual activity in the tunnel. Such incidents span everything from
accidents to slow-moving vehicles that need to be tracked, to wrong-way drivers and dangerous debris on the road. To offer
operators the best quality image for every situation, the units can simultaneously encode and stream H.264, MPEG-4 and
MJPEG in real time with low latency. Data collection
For the traffic management component, known as the Video Vehicle Detection System (VVDS), FLIR Intelligent Transportation Systems delivered 45 video servers. These collect data that is required for everyday operations (such atraffic flow speed and zone occupancy)
and for enabling the tunnel managers to develop long-term operational strategies.
Both individual data parameters – suc speed, headway, gap time, vehicle
classification – and integrated vehicle traffic data – such as volume and
average speed per vehicle class per lane,
headway, gap time per length class per
lane and occupancy – can be gathered as required.
Decentralized system The total solution has been installed in a
decentralized way. FLIR’s video encoders are spread over 24 locations and servers
have been set up in a 2 by 2 redundant configuration.
Video server with integrated Automatic Incident Detection (AID)
FLIR’s advanced video server solution combines field-proven incident
detection capabilities with advanced
video encoding and powerful processing technology in a single unit. The
video server provides embedded AID analytics and multi-stream encoding.
This combination of technologies makes for a very cost-effective solution
which at the same time offers toplevel performance. The advanced
processing unit generates traffic data and incident detection information and
thus supports traffic operators with
alerts on stopped vehicles, wrong-way drivers, pedestrians, lost cargo, smoke
and traffic flow data. Video management system The glue that joins the VIDS and VVDS
applications together is FLUX, FLIR’s intelligent software platform. FLUX collects traffic data,
events, alarms and video images generated by the VIP system and communicates with the VIP
system over Ethernet. The software’s overarching aim is to manage and
control all of this data and make it useful, meaningful and relevant to the user.
The software provides a user-friendly interface composed of a monitoring
and a reporting application and allows control room operators to monitor events
and alarms in real time. The software is fully integrated into the overall traffic
management system.
