TRAFFIC EFFICIENCY & MOBILITY
SOCRATES 2.0
TRAFFIC IN HARMONY
Assessor: trusted third party in traffic management 2.0
Harmonising traffic management and innovative traffic information is no easy task, but the newly created role of the Assessor within the SOCRATES2.0 project offers the best solution as Nuno Rodrigues, Giovanni Huisken, Anton Wijbenga and Joost Vandenbossche elucidate
How many road users follow advice to take another route to avoid a traffic jam? , © MAPtm
Smoother, safer and more sustainable traffic in the European Union: road authorities, service providers and car manufacturers all collaborated in SOCRATES2.0 to work towards these objectives.
It is clear these goals require effective collaboration between traffic management and innovative traffic information and navigation services. So, the partners created a cooperation framework, including four newly defined intermediary roles: the Assessor, the Strategy Table, the Network Monitor and the Network Manager. The public and private partners seated at the Strategy Table use the validated insights from the Assessor to make data-driven strategic decisions on how to improve the new jointly developed road user navigation services.
The SOCRATES2.0 Cooperation Framework, © SOCRATES2.0
The Assessor plays an independent expert role when evaluating both technological and commercial aspects of the cooperation. It supports the management of the Service Level Agreements and ensures everyone honours the cooperation principles. In its independent and unbiased role, the Assessor can act as a trusted third party. It collects and interprets information that is preferably not shared with the whole consortium. The Assessor only shares the individually agreed upon information with the rest of the partners.
The Assessor in practice
Each week in 2020, the Assessor assessed the performance of the services delivered by the SOCRATES2.0 partners for Smart Routing, one of the three SOCRATES2.0 services piloted in Amsterdam. The advice was jointly developed and delivered by local road operators (city of Amsterdam, Province of North Holland and and the Directorate-General for Public Works and Water Management. Dutch: Rijkswaterstaat), public and private data service providers (NDW, Be-Mobile, TomTom) and end-user service providers (Be-Mobile and TomTom).
Weekly performance reports were collected from the public service providers, the three Traffic Management Centres in the Amsterdam Metropolitan Region, and from private service providers. These provided information on the technical and functional performance of their services, together with quantitative figures on the usage of the Smart routing service by service providers and road travellers. In some cases, this led to valuable insights on the observed and measured behavioural change.
Information for strategic decision-making
At an earlier stage the partners seated at the Strategy Table had defined the key performance indicators (KPIs) for insights on the success of the Socrates Smart routing service. The Assessor’s task is to validate and translate the weekly performance reports into the defined KPIs on network performance (travel time, speed and traffic volumes). It also looks at the success of service providers in “nudging” road users towards the Socrates route advice. The Assessor also monitors and reports on the performance of the other intermediary services, such as the availability and accuracy of current and predicted traffic states provided by the Network Monitor, or the amount and quality of service request from the Network Manager.
Assessor’s monthly report to Strategy Table, © MAPtm
All this information is presented at the monthly Strategy Table meetings with all partners. The objective of those meetings is for Socrates partners to identify, discuss and agree on new or adjusted measures to help achieve the service goals or KPI targets. The partners who had delivered services within the Smart Routing service jointly assessed the services’ performance over the previous months based on the Assessor’s data-driven monthly report. They also identified what could be improved in the cooperation through new business opportunities.
Waterfall method: how many drivers follow traffic advice?
In order to fuel the SOCRATES2.0 data driven strategic decision-making process, the Assessor and the service providers developed a new feedback loop report protocol called the ‘Waterfall method’. The goal of the Waterfall is to capture detailed insights from service providers on the implementation and performance of SOCRATES2.0-generated routing advice.
To show that changes in network traffic performance was the result of services delivered by SOCRATES2.0 providers and not by other information and navigation services, insight into the number of road users being influenced is needed. The Waterfall method provides these numbers and helps to differentiate between the value of existing services and SOCRATES2.0-induced services Every week, the service providers submitted the Waterfall report to the Assessor, including the following information:
- Aggregated volumes of road users (travellers) who received route advice, and how many changed or likely changed their routes accordingly or did not change their routes.
- Reasons service providers accepted or delined to provide advice to road users based on SOCRATES2.0-induced services.
- Context information, for example, Traffic Management Centre logging, weather reports, road works.
In order to fuel the SOCRATES2.0 data driven strategic decision-making process, the Assessor and the service providers developed a new feedback loop report protocol called the ‘Waterfall method’
Three SOCRATES2.0 services have been piloted in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, © MAPtm
Analysing the impact of measures
The service providers post-processed their monitoring data, which includes their service operational data and user's ‘track and trace’. This helped them determine the number of road users for each of the Waterfall report fields. The Assessor could then use these numbers as an indication of:
- The possible impact of the measures deployed by the partner.
- The partner’s effort to implement the SOCRATES2.0 service request.
- The resolving power or sensibility of the SOCRATES2.0 services.
- The contribution of one partner compared to the other partners.
The Assessor: next level
SOCRATES2.0 partners are currently consolidating the developed cooperation framework, building on the large amounts of results and insights gathered over the past four years. The Assessor role and concept is still in its early stages, but it is already seen by all partners as a new necessary role to support sustainable and trusted public-private traffic management cooperation. The Assessor role is already being described, prescribed, and further developed at a next level, in new upcoming implementations of SOCRATES2.0-inspired public-private interactive traffic management schemes.
Nuno Rodrigues, Giovanni Huisken, Anton Wijbenga and Joost Vandenbossche are, respectively, Liaison manager at SOCRATES2.0 and New Business manager at MAPtm, Deputy Project Manager SOCRATES2.0 at Rijkswaterstraat, Traffic and Data Scientist at MAPtm and Co-lead Mobility Lab at Be-Mobile. Contact them: nuno.rodrigues@maptm.nl, giovanni.huisken@rws.nl, anton.wijbenga@maptm.nl and joost.vandenbossche@be-mobile.com
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