14-05-2019
Join us on ITS Europe Congress
SOCRATES2.0 is presenting itself to the international ITS community during the ITS Europe Congress (3-6 June, Eindhoven, the Netherlands). Different private Service Providers demonstrate a Smart Tunnel Service, which will be tested in the Antwerp region. And we are also demonstrating several intermediary roles to be deployed in use cases in Intractive Traffic Management, for example the Assessor dashboard for the optimal route guidance service in Amsterdam and Antwerp.
The partners in SOCRATES2.0 are defining and experiencing sustainable public-private cooperation and business cases in traffic management. The SOCRATES2.0 main learning objectives are to gain insights on how to organise the cooperation between public and private parties, and what key elements are necessary to assure scalability and success of the selected smart traffic services and traffic management.
What’s new?
The project works as much as possible with existing techniques to realise the traffic services and traffic management. So, what’s new? All parties involved – international service providers, car manufacturers, ITS companies and road authorities cooperate and share information. This is an important step in the direction of implementation of smart mobility services, and makes SOCRATES2.0 a unique and valuable project, from which lessons can be drawn for all stakeholders in the traffic management chain.
Framework on public-private Traffic Management
The SOCRATES2.0 partners defined a shared vision and common ground for cooperation on a strategic level, the so-called SOCRATES2.0 framework on public-private traffic management. The vision of the SOCRATES2.0 partners is that cooperation will lead to a win-win-win situation for all actors in the traffic management eco-system: the road user, the road operator (Traffic Management Centres) and service providers. To establish something new, they recognised that a paradigm shift should bemade from ‘managing and influencing traffic’ to ‘supporting individual people on their travel from A to B’. To bring this vision to the pilots, customers (road user) and the communities will be actively involved, pre-trip, on-trip and post-trip. As a result, the vision does not just focus on technology or the traffic management process but is elaborated along four elements: customer, community, technology and cooperation.
Cooperation models
The cooperation models were defined in the form of a matrix, looking at three dimensions regarding the exchange of traffic management strategies:
- Level of commonality: Is there a commonly agreed plan for coordinated actions or common insights, a so called ‘common truth’?
- Level of detail: At what level of detail do we want/need a commonly agreed ‘truth’?
- Level of commitment of the stakeholders: Are stakeholders free to use the agreed plan/basis or do they commit themselves to a set of needed actions to achieve the common goals?
Cooperation models to be tested in SOCRATES2.0:
Intermediary roles
The various use cases and cooperation models each ask for certain intermediary roles to be fulfilled by stakeholders: a facilitating actor or function for the interaction between public and private service providers in delivering traffic management services. Several intermediary functions were identified and clustered - based on needed expertise- resulting in the following four different clusters of intermediary roles:
- Strategy Table
- Network Monitor
- Network Manager
- Assessor
Each of these intermediary roles is described in general terms and is used as a reference for detailed description when applied to specific use cases and cooperation models.
The types of and need for intermediary roles is one of the elements to be studied within SOCRATES2.0, therefor the project experiments with different combinations of cooperation models and intermediary roles over the pilot sites and use cases. Not all intermediary roles are necessary in all of the cooperation models. Where the focus of cooperation is based only on the exchange of information (CM1 and CM2) some intermediary roles do not necessarily add value to the use case. For a cooperation based on creating common data insights only (CM3 and CM4) the Network Monitor seems necessary and an Assessor would also be beneficial. Also, not each task per role needs to be deployed. The most advanced and complex cooperation models require all four intermediary roles.