A CORBA service for road traffic information on the Internet

The development of business to business services in application domains is well served by the use of the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) as defined by the Object Management Group (OMG). The intelligent transportation systems (ITS) domain must meet statutory requirements for centre to centre communications in all countries but it is also becoming commercially active in the development of new travel related products. This paper discusses the design, implementation and results from a pilot application in the use of CORBA to deliver, in near real time across the Internet, a service which notifies clients of the state of the matrix signal and variable message sign settings on the English motorway network.