New Concept for UTMS

The purpose of a traffic control system is to ensure the safe and smooth traffic flow, and the traffic control system has functions of controlling traffic signals by traffic data acquired by vehicle detectors, and of providing drivers with the traffic information. Today, the upgrading of the traffic control system is required to solve traffic problems such as the increase of traffic accidents and aggravated traffic jams. In addition, the vehicle navigation system has been spread in Japan and in foreign countries such as U. S. A. and EC member countries who are now developing their own traffic information supply system. Under such circumstances, the National Police Agency, Japan (NPA) which govems Japanese traffic management is faced with re-investigation of their concept of the traffic control system, and the NPA has been promoting to introduce an advanced traffic management system called Universal Traffic Management System (UTMS) based on this new concept. In 1993 the UTMS promoting council which consists of NPA and private corporation was established and the reserch and experiments which are more practical have been carried on. From the viewpoint of traffic control using an automatic control system, this paper deals with four items such as the optimum control of the signal control system, the traffic information supply system, the advanced traffic control system supported by a traffic data acquisition system with lower cost and higher performance, and goal of UTMS.