Recycling transport telematic software applications
In response to these unacceptable and continuous upgrade costs; the EC funded a project that would be able to integrate future upgrades into the existing system by facilitating the re-use of infrastructure legacy by new transport telematic applications. Thus, the OMNI (Open Model For Network-wide Heterogeneous Intersection-based Transport Management) platform was established to provide the guidelines for future software upgrades. Built on top of this platform, is the UTC (Urban Traffic Control) subsystem manager. This system is designed to enhance the integration of any generic UTC subsystem, thus enabling device dependent and application dependant mechanisms to be far more effective. Containing hundreds of entities that represent the many different aspects of urban traffic movements, a generic concept manager determines which subset of entities should be used for integration. This facilitates the UTC subsystem to introduce building blocks, which integrates with the OMNI platform in the most generic fashion possible. Further the UTC subsystem manager provides subsystem integration with the aid of documentation, which is complemented with a library of software components in the form of a software development kit. As a result of the software development kit the developers have been able to further exploit its potential and therefore incorporate the UTOPIA UTC user interface. The logical sequence of events for the UTC subsystem begins with connection to the OMNI platform and then to provide an operational and physical interface representation of the subsystem. It then updates the OMNI run-time contents, monitors the changes of the OMNI run-time contents, reports the relevant changes to the connected subsystem and finally disconnects from the OMNI platform.
