If you’ve ever wondered where all that information on road conditions and travel times on radio, TV, websites and smartphone applications comes from, chances are the New Zealand Transport Agency (NZTA) and their TREIS system has something to do with it.

Established by the NZ Government in 2008 by merging the Transit NZ and Land Transport agencies, the NZTA maintains and improves the country’s network of around 11,000 kilometres of state highway roading infrastructure. Their role extends from planning and funding investment in new roads and cycleways, maintaining the existing network, supporting public transport, licensing road and rail users and ensuring road safety. It also includes tracking any events that impact the performance of the network such as accidents, road works or flooding.

The NZTA Highways & Network Operations Division has a long-term strategic approach designed to ensure customers have access to information through appropriate channels.

The goal is to enable customers to make decisions about their travel plans based on the information they receive.

This information, referred to as Traveller Information Services data, includes state highway road and traffic information, limited webcam coverage, road works, and holiday traffic information. It also provides a platform for disseminating other information to the public from other areas of NZTA.

The big picture
Central to NZTA’s management of New Zealand’s state highway network is a complex geospatial data application called TREIS (Traffic Road Event Information System).

TREIS is a centralised repository of New Zealand road network ‘event’ information.

‘Events’ are occurrences that are happening or will happen (e.g. road works, scheduled maintenance, hazards and warnings of conditions such as snow) on the New Zealand highway network. TREIS is at the centre of this road management universe. Event information is collected from network management consultants, emergency services, and members of the public, and, historically, has been made available via the NZTA call centre advising road conditions to users.

NZTA’s strategic objective was to improve dissemination of TREIS information with the aim of more effectively changing road user behaviour, and ultimately saving millions in reduced travel time and uncertainty, as well as reducing fuel wastage and environmental pollution.

Travelling into the fast lane
After identifying performance issues in the original TREIS application, and prototyping a solution, Fujitsu took the initiative for a major re-architecture to web-enable the application, and to open up external web services via RSS and XML data feeds out to third parties such as AA Roadwatch and NavMan.

Deidre Hills was the project manager who oversaw the development of TREIS. “NZTA have engaged Fujitsu as a preferred supplier on a number of high profile projects. They provide an excellent service particularly in the areas of project management, system development, testing, support and documentation with service delivery that either meets or exceeds expectations,” said Hills.

While they were at it, the Fujitsu team also gave the application an overhaul in the back end with all data being migrated to SQL 2008 to simplify data backup and disaster recovery, and improved back end release processes.

Providing TREIS data out to third party application developers also upped the ante on 24 x 7 service availability and performance.

The early challenge was to monitor the application’s complex underlying workings using a software solution, minimising human involvement in tracking and event diagnosis, and fine-tuning process workflow and application performance, all underpinned by oncall support 24 x 7 from Fujitsu.

Mash-up on the bus
‘InfoConnect’ was the tag given to the NZTA gateway to the external developer community. NZTA’s strategy was to extend this to provide access to a variety of verified highway data. In other words, provide the data to enable Web 2.0 style mash-ups.

In 2010 Fujitsu enhanced InfoConnect’s data feed architecture, security and stability, and introduced quality of service attributes. The platform was based on Apache Service Mix, an open source Enterprise Service Bus (ESB).

The traffic and road information was provided to web developers and businesses who were then able to build specialised applications and devices which delivered enriched information to road users in a variety of ways.

Current examples include applications for iPhones, iPads, satellite navigation systems and websites such as AA Roadwatch.

The API docs for the feeds are provided publicly via
https://infoconnect.highwayinfo.govt.nz

The resulting successful take up within the developer community led the NZTA to submit InfoConnect to the 2010 NZ Open Source Awards where it was a finalist in the ‘Use in Government’ category.

InfoConnect was also a finalist in the 2011 IPANZ Awards – for the category of ‘Excellence in Networked Government’.

Craig Soutar, Chief Information Officer at NZTA was suitably impressed. “These are prestigious awards and it is a privilege for us to get this far” he said. Fujitsu have continued to work with NZTA to provide enhancements which make additional data available to developers via InfoConnect from NZTA’s source systems. These include:

• Traffic cameras, now totalling 93 across Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch, Otaki, Paremata, Dunedin and Waiouru.

• Real time data on traffic conditions in Auckland including congestion

• Estimated journey times along the state highway network calculated from traffic flow

• Authoritative information about the state highway centreline.

FOR MORE INFORMATION//

FUJITSU NEW ZEALAND
W: www.nz.fujitsu.com
E: askus-nz@nz.fujitsu.com
P: +64 4 495 0700

FUJITSU AUSTRALIA
W: www.au.fujitsu.com
E: askus@au.fujitsu.com
P: +61 2 9113 9200










11/10/06_ex_m_h_nl