Possibilities of System Integration in the Development of Operations in the Road Traffic Management Centers in Finland

The Finnish Transport Agency (FTA) has road traffic management centres in four different locations in Helsinki, Turku, Tampere and Oulu in 2013. Currently the Finnish ITS systems are controlled via more than 40 separated traffic controls systems that hardly communicate with each other and all of the systems have own clients, servers, GUIs with many screens that makes the traffic control challenging for the operators. The Finnish Transport Agency (FTA) is developing an integrated traffic control operating system (T-LOIK) to ease the monitoring and controlling of the separate systems in the road traffic management centres (TMC). The system enables the simultaneous use of all operating systems, maintains the situational awareness and facilitates communication between authorities with a single interface. The operation of road traffic management centres has to be enhanced also as the T-LOIK system changes the mode of operation. The future also brings other challenges, e.g. the increasing number of various traffic control systems. This paper concentrates especially on how the operation of road traffic management centres could be developed considering the new possibilities that the integrated system creates. It was also investigated how the integrated system enhances the cooperation and communication between authorities taking part in incident management and operators in TMCs. The schedule for the system integration is 2013-2018 and budget around 30 Meuros.