SWARCO: What is your role in SWARCO’s innovation office?
Manuel Milli: I am SWARCO’s Solution Manager for Smart Mobility and Urban Traffic Management. My role is to support the SWARCO companies in achieving their goals while ensuring compliance to the group objectives and strategy.
SWARCO: What are the key solution’s features SWARCO offers in your market sector?
Manuel Milli: Urban Traffic Management is from many perspectives the most relevant market sector for SWARCO. We can provide turnkey solutions ranging from reliable and certified field equipment such as traffic light controllers, signal heads, variable message signs up to highly sophisticated traffic management central systems as well as consultancy and expert services.
SWARCO: Which new features, improvements or products have you introduced recently?
Manuel Milli: We are setting up strategic alliances to integrate traffic information collected from connected vehicles into our central systems in combination with our traditional sensors. We are moving from a product sales to solution as a service approach. In this framework we have developed the City Dashboard and made our systems Big Data ready.
SWARCO: How do current developments like connected and autonomous vehicles affect your business area?
Manuel Milli: Connected vehicles are an extremely interesting source of information. Almost all our systems and solutions strongly rely on sensors and detectors, but these are sometimes expensive to install and for sure costly to maintain. Complementing (if not replacing) traditional sensor technology with cloud sources will bring extremely high benefits. Highly automated and connected vehicles set new quality standards on infrastructure and its maintenance, paving the way for new traffic control schemes. Existing infrastructure is upgraded in order to become “smarter”.
SWARCO: Which new technology or trend are you currently working on?
Manuel Milli: The range of traffic modes gets more diverse: Bicycles, pedestrians, public transport, and highly automated vehicles receive tailored information and demand new traffic management approaches. 50 billion Internet of Things enabled devices generate massive amounts of data which is used to predict and react to traffic and mobility events. Traditional traffic detection is complemented by data from vehicles and mobile devices.
Original source: SWARCO
