2012-09-11

This post is about how one city manages traffic and sensing devices to create optimum traffic flow under dynamic and changing conditions. This is a large metropolitan area that is densely populated. In addition to managing traffic flow, this set of processes handles fault management for over 20,000 devices that are along the roadways, bridges and tracks. All of this while tracking road usage licenses of vehicles sharing the roadways.



The Need for Intelligent Business Operations:

When leveraging monitoring, notification and traffic control devices, there is a need for sensing, modeling and adapting to the emerging traffic patterns and accidental surprises caused by drivers, weather and the transportation ways. These have to be combined in an intelligent way to suggest alternatives to the human traffic controllers.

The Answer was a Rule Driven Set of Processes:

This kind of system requires and extensive event management and pattern sensing set of technologies. Once patterns are sensed, models need to be run to find optimum solutions for the emerging conditions and complex management of multiple incidents within a limited geography and sets of alternatives. Once a solution is chosen, it must be carried out quickly and consistently. This city chose an iBPMS to solve this complex set of related processes.

The Results:

This metropolitan area is able to manage traffic  under changing conditions by rerouting traffic through driver notification and auto traffic controls. It supports 18 traffic controllers per 12 hour shift 365 days a year thus optimizing the road infrastructure while optimizing usage revenues. All of this while keeping 20,000 devices up and running. When the devices have problems they also get an assist from the fault management processes.

Fault Management Results:

•Process Flow: A defined fault management workflow prioritization and escalation of faults to field technicians

•Automation: Automatic prioritization and escalation of faults that reduces manual investigation of alarms

•SLA tracking: Service Level Agreement and KPI tracking across the whole process lifecycle

•Reporting: Improved fault reporting and tracking one set of integrated reports

•Asset Management: Improved asset and inventory management availability of device data

•Scalability: A system that is scalable and handles all faults from other sources Integrated & consistent views

•Flexibility: Flexibility to meet future functionality business requirements in the  Application Development Environment

Net; Net:

Most companies have work flowing like cities have traffic . Routing work and keeping track of work in progress and tracing work routes is pretty normal with all work. Applying analytics and dynamic behavior what IBO applies to a lot of work problems.

The above success story has been summarized and made anonymous to get the essence of the success documented quickly. The source of this success story is a technology provider named Pegasystems.

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