Buckinghamshire, England, 12 April 2007: Amey’s Scottish Trunk Roads Asset Management Team is using ESRI’s GIS technology to ensure incidents on its roads cause minimum disruption by improving efficiency in Amey’s control room.
Amey and ESRI have developed ORCID (Operations Room Control of Incident Database), a new user-friendly dataset based on ESRI GIS for recording incidents on the trunk road network that Amey manages and maintains in southern Scotland. The control room team works closely with the emergency services and regional broadcast travel desks to ensure incidents are managed professionally and safely.
ORCID allows control room staff to see a complete picture of the roadside environment where an incident is taking place. The system includes detailed inventory such as safety fences and signs and has links to digital networks. Using this mapping information, and accurate Global Positioning System (GPS) coordinates, control room staff plot an accurate position of each incident. Staff can then dispatch Amey’s Trunk Road Incident Support Service (TRISS) unit immediately to a precise location.
Amey has worked with ESRI (UK) to customise its ArcMap software application to allow automated, user-friendly input, and has also taken advantage of ESRI’s ArcSDE server software for secure data-retrieval by multiple users. Information is then served on an ESRI ArcIMS- based intranet site to allow real-time information. With this ORCID quickly identifies long-term incident patterns and cluster sites.
Gary Nulty, project manager, Amey, said: “We recognised the need for a new system to better record incidents on the network and were keen to use our in-house GIS skills to come up with a solution. The result has been a product that we can tailor exactly to our needs that provides us with accurate information which can be re-used throughout the business, at a reduced cost to the company”. “The system has proved to be a useful resource, benefiting several departments within Amey. It has been a major achievement for the team to have been involved in the development of such an innovative and successful project.”
