High Level Service Oriented Architecture for the Road Traffic Domain

This paper characterizes the road traffic domain as having three components: construction and maintenance of infrastructure, road pricing, and traffic management. These components are interdependent. Therefore, they have to be harmonized at the strategic, tactical and operational level. In order to this harmonization to occur, accurate data must be collected on each component. The authors propose considering the acquisition and management of data and the derivation of information as separately developed services or processes. They contend that, by doing so, other problems, such as redundancy in data acquisition, non-uniform definitions of data, and flexible delivering of information based on the same data can also be resolved. Shared development of systems for the collection and management of data and for the composition and delivery of information may offer large advantages because a lot of different business processes and parties use the same data and information. They conclude by proposing a high-level, service oriented architecture for the road traffic domain. The paper uses as an example the current development in the Netherlands of Nationale Databank Wegverkeersgegevens (NDW National Database for Road Traffic Data).