The Urban Traffic Control system for Northern Ireland was installed in Belfast in the lates 1970’s. This provided the ability to directly control traffic signals from a remote location. It also provided real time fault reporting. Communication between the UTC system and the on-street equipment was by point-to-point analogue telephones lines rented from BT. BT announced that these would no longer be supported or installed from 2018. DFI Roads therefore contracted Siemens PLC to migrate the 330 analogue lines in Belfast, Lisburn, Bangor, Banbridge, Armagh and Newry to a solution of Broadband (DSL IP), 3G GSM (mobile phone technology) and MESH (radio nework).
The objectives of the project were:
- move away from obsolete analogue technology
- provide a more resilient system solution that will not be vulnerable to any single point of failure
- Reduce the ongoing resource costs.
The project was undertaken as part of existing contracts with both Siemens and BT and commenced in February 2015. A detailed survey of the existing networks was carried out as was an evaluation of the available technologies (fibre optic/copper/wireless). A detailed design was completed by TICC, BT and Siemens.
On street work to convert to IP circuits started in February 2015. Work was carried out in several tranches to allow adequate testing and the making redundant of analogue circuits making resource savings throughout the project.
The project was successfully completed in March 2016 with all 330 analogue circuits decommissioned and successfully migrated to IP.
Other types of ITS equipment, such as VMS and Air Quality monitoring units, are also connected to the UTC system.
For the detailed description see attachment.