Application of a real time expert system for incident management in Scotland

In June 1996 The Scottish Office launched their National Driver Information and Control System (NADICS). NADICS has drawn together many stand alone driver information and traffic control systems and has been established to provide road users with driver information on an integrated Scotland wide basis. NADICS currently covers 452 km of trunk roads, including 73 km of urban motorway through Glasgow and the inter-urban network from Perth in the north, Edinburgh in the east and Abington in the south. The system comprises of the following on-street equipment: strategic VMS; strategic traffic detectors; lane control signal gantries; combined motorway signal units/single line VMS; urban motorway traffic detectors; SOS telephones; and CCTV cameras. Previous papers (MacKenzie et al., see Proc. 6th International Conf. on Road Traffic Monitoring and Control, p.199-203, 1992, and Anderson et al., see Proc. ATT/IVHS World Conf., Paris, p.270-7, 1994) describe the aims, development and evaluation of the initial year of operation of the system. This paper follows on from these and describes the application of a real time expert system, OPERA (Outil Pour l´Exploitation d´un Reseau d´Autoroutes), within the inter-urban module of NADICS