ITS (UK), the Intelligent Transport Society for the United Kingdom, has relaunched its Security and Resilience Interest Group. The Group was formerly known as the Security Interest Group and the new name reflects a new focus on using Intelligent Transport Systems to improve the resilience of transport, the role of ITS in emergency planning, as well as covering using ITS to benefit the security of transport infrastructure and transport users.
The renamed and refocused Group launched itself with a round table meeting in London in November. It covered weather resilience, with talks by IBI Group on how Transport Scotland collects and disseminates data and information relating to weather events, and by Cogniva Consultants on tunnel safety systems including weather related systems at the tunnel portals. The Integrated Transport Weather Information Pilot in Sunderland was also covered, and Atkins provided a talk about weather resilience and asset management. As well as weather related topics, there was an update by SmartCCTV on the progress of the new CCTV regulations, which will have an impact on traffic control rooms and the use of cameras for transport-related surveillance and data collection. Finally, ITS (UK) provided an overview of the IET’s publications on security and resilience.
The Security and Resilience IG is led by Chairman Dr Mark Beecroft of the University of Aberdeen with the assistance of Mr Nick Hewitson of SmartCCTV Ltd.
Summing up the relaunch meeting, Neal Skelton of ITS (UK) said that the new focus on resilience will make the Group more relevant to the ITS (UK) membership as a whole, but that the security focus, particularly on dealing with the terrorist threat to the UK’s transport network, which he described as significant, must remain very important.
