Peter Ummenhofer, head of the ITS Business Unit at Kapsch TrafficCom, discusses what the recent acquisition of US ATMS specialist Transdyn will mean for the company and the ITS sector. Even a brief perusal of Kapsch’s portfolio lends credence to the company’s assertion that it is more than ‘just a tolling systems and services supplier’. Over the past few years, the company has added road safety enforcement to its offering with significant commercial vehicle operations capabilities, including weigh in motion
Peter Ummenhofer, head of the ITS Business Unit at Kapsch TrafficCom, discusses what the recent acquisition of US ATMS specialist Transdyn will mean for the company and the ITS sector.
Even a brief perusal of81 Kapsch’s portfolio lends credence to the company’s assertion that it is more than ‘just a tolling systems and services supplier’. Over the past few years, the company has added road safety enforcement to its offering with significant commercial vehicle operations capabilities, including weigh in motion. Meanwhile, its electronic vehicle registration solutions help emerging economies increase the compliance rates in vehicle registration. Kapsch has a growing presence in 5.9 GHz-based connected vehicle (V2X) sectors and lately due to the acquisition of 5683 Transdyn, there is now extensive expertise in the Advanced Traffic Management System (ATMS) arena.
Portfolio expansion is a mixture of in-house development and acquisition and Kapsch, like its competitors, has embraced the trend of convergence between the tolling and ITS sectors. The acquisition of an ATMS specialist such as Transdyn makes perfect sense, says Peter Ummenhofer, who heads Kapsch’s ITS Business Unit: “Kapsch was more and more facing the need to have its own ATMS portfolio. We could have developed our own ATMS solution but, recognising that there were already very mature and capable companies and products out in the market, we decided to look at what was available with a view to acquisition.
“We looked at several companies but had already been familiar with Transdyn for some years, having been partners on projects including the North Tarrant Express and LBJ Express managed lane systems in Dallas and North Texas, the largest single system of its type to be built in the US in the last two decades.”
“It’s a SCADA [supervisory control and data acquisition] system but with a distinct ITS/ATMS flavour. We evaluated several products and Dynac turned out to be one of the most advanced and comprehensive ATMS solutions on the global market. It provides a rich set of very advanced features, is mature, proven, highly flexible and has modern Java-based software architecture.”
Recognising that, often, the only way to gain a significant presence in the North American market is to ‘become’ American, Kapsch has form for acquisition, having bought Mark IV IVHS back in 2010 in order to establish itself more fully in the tolling sector there. However, the purchase of Transdyn has a greater international flavour than might at First be apparent.
Ummenhofer explains: “Although it undoubtedly increases our North American footprint, we’re chasing a global success story.
“This is a global acquisition – the ITS Business Unit remains headquartered in Vienna, for instance. It combines Transdyn’s world-class ATMS solution with Kapsch’s worldwide sales network.”
Transdyn, he notes, has a very stable home market in the US and is also the preferred vendor with Australian Toll road operator600 Transurban as well as supplying New Zealand Transport Agency’s national traffic management solution and a project in Israel. The aim, says Ummenhofer, is to make the company a truly global ATMS vendor.
“You don’t tend to see SCADA systems in a typical UTC solution. The urban environment is very hardware-driven and centred chiefly on intersection control and between-intersection monitoring and management. It’s also dominated by umbrella solutions such as the SCATS [Sydney Coordinated Adaptive Traffic System] and SCOOT [Split Cycle Offset Optimisation Technique] adaptive traffic control systems.
“UTC contrasts with inter-urban and highway traffic management, where the emphasis is on capacity maximisation through ramp metering and alternative route guidance. The rise of newer concepts such as hard shoulder running also has to be noted – people are starting to realise that a lot of lane capacity is currently standing empty and that the application of the right technology, including the appropriate automatic incident detection solutions, can change that.
“Our ambition is to be a key global player in the highway management space.”
“We’re bringing together two portfolios which are entirely complementary and non-conflicting. Traffic operations, though, will benefit significantly. If you can use roadside systems for multiple applications, then you can share power and data supplies to the same cabinet. One service team can take the place of several.
“In the back office, you can bring together traffic management and tolling payment data to create a more accurate picture of current traffic situations. That results in the ability, for instance, to generate more accurate travel time information and improve both services and operations.
“In short, there’s a whole handful of opportunities to reduce costs. That’s being reflected in current tender documents. Across the world in countries such as Russia, the USA and Chile, procurement authorities are requesting complete packages, not discrete solutions.
“That pushes another synergy – with V2X. We at Kapsch have been very active in 5.9GHz technology, producing in-vehicle equipment and roadside transceivers which will allow cooperative vehicles to exchange data. In some respects there was a gap in the back office capability but the Transdyn acquisition fills this. Proliferation of the necessary technology within the vehicle fleet might take some time but we’re now positioned to be able to say to road operators and concessions who know this technology is on the way that they can start now to prepare for its arrival or can procure systems which offer them a clear migration path from a ‘conventional’ solution to a future V2X one.”
Ummenhofer: “Standards are undoubtedly a concern. In German-speaking countries, for instance, the TLS standard, though dated, is still common. Across Europe, we have DATEX2 on strategic roads and other, more urban-centric standards such as UTMC. To be successful internationally, we have to be adaptable. NTCIP is a modern, IP-based standard and, where customers have no preference, of course we’re going to offer guidance. But migration of DYNAC is a straightforward affair. Through its activities in international markets Transdyn already has staff well-versed in interfacing with established and stable standards and it’s an area that we’re going to be offering even more support to as we ramp up the global presence.”
“Kapsch will retain its core expertise as a tolling vendor but our current activities aren’t just an effort to increase our potential, they’re part of moves to address demand with a competitive portfolio. We follow the market – of course we do, that’s a philosophical issue – but the demand in tenders for broader, bigger solutions is also driving the market.
“Convergence will continue in a step-wise manner. What we have now is the early stages and the coming together of stand-alone applications. But that’ll tighten and my example of a single-source, seamless ETC/ATMS solution provides a glimpse of how that will happen. That next-stage ‘tightening’ will be influenced by such things as V2X and by related standards such as those for 5.9GHz-based communications.
“We’ll reach a stage where we have an open vehicle Telematics platform which uses the same roadside systems for applications which remain unintegrated at present. The back office systems are already there to support this.
“All that’s within the next five years or so. Further out, given the rate of development we’re experiencing now, predicting where we’ll be would be a rather fanciful undertaking.”
Even a brief perusal of
Portfolio expansion is a mixture of in-house development and acquisition and Kapsch, like its competitors, has embraced the trend of convergence between the tolling and ITS sectors. The acquisition of an ATMS specialist such as Transdyn makes perfect sense, says Peter Ummenhofer, who heads Kapsch’s ITS Business Unit: “Kapsch was more and more facing the need to have its own ATMS portfolio. We could have developed our own ATMS solution but, recognising that there were already very mature and capable companies and products out in the market, we decided to look at what was available with a view to acquisition.
“We looked at several companies but had already been familiar with Transdyn for some years, having been partners on projects including the North Tarrant Express and LBJ Express managed lane systems in Dallas and North Texas, the largest single system of its type to be built in the US in the last two decades.”
Global offering
Ummenhofer describes Transdyn’s Dynac solution as “world-class”.“It’s a SCADA [supervisory control and data acquisition] system but with a distinct ITS/ATMS flavour. We evaluated several products and Dynac turned out to be one of the most advanced and comprehensive ATMS solutions on the global market. It provides a rich set of very advanced features, is mature, proven, highly flexible and has modern Java-based software architecture.”
Recognising that, often, the only way to gain a significant presence in the North American market is to ‘become’ American, Kapsch has form for acquisition, having bought Mark IV IVHS back in 2010 in order to establish itself more fully in the tolling sector there. However, the purchase of Transdyn has a greater international flavour than might at First be apparent.
Ummenhofer explains: “Although it undoubtedly increases our North American footprint, we’re chasing a global success story.
“This is a global acquisition – the ITS Business Unit remains headquartered in Vienna, for instance. It combines Transdyn’s world-class ATMS solution with Kapsch’s worldwide sales network.”
Transdyn, he notes, has a very stable home market in the US and is also the preferred vendor with Australian Toll road operator
Inter-urban focus
He draws some distinctions in terms of positioning. There are, for instance, absolutely no intentions at present of getting involved in urban traffic control (UTC). There are several reasons for this including the market already being well-served by a number of large and established players. There is also, he concedes, the fact that by virtue of Kapsch’s history of being a tolling systems and services supplier for strategic routes and therefore mainly dealing with roads authorities and tolling concessionaires, it does not have the customer base in the urban environment – as yet.“You don’t tend to see SCADA systems in a typical UTC solution. The urban environment is very hardware-driven and centred chiefly on intersection control and between-intersection monitoring and management. It’s also dominated by umbrella solutions such as the SCATS [Sydney Coordinated Adaptive Traffic System] and SCOOT [Split Cycle Offset Optimisation Technique] adaptive traffic control systems.
“UTC contrasts with inter-urban and highway traffic management, where the emphasis is on capacity maximisation through ramp metering and alternative route guidance. The rise of newer concepts such as hard shoulder running also has to be noted – people are starting to realise that a lot of lane capacity is currently standing empty and that the application of the right technology, including the appropriate automatic incident detection solutions, can change that.
“Our ambition is to be a key global player in the highway management space.”
Synergies and economies
There are plans to continue to offer DYNAC as a stand-alone traffic management solution but another ambition over time is to offer to the market single-source Electronic Toll Collection (ETC)/ATMS solutions which are more seamless. There are, says Ummenhofer, greater synergies to be had.“We’re bringing together two portfolios which are entirely complementary and non-conflicting. Traffic operations, though, will benefit significantly. If you can use roadside systems for multiple applications, then you can share power and data supplies to the same cabinet. One service team can take the place of several.
“In the back office, you can bring together traffic management and tolling payment data to create a more accurate picture of current traffic situations. That results in the ability, for instance, to generate more accurate travel time information and improve both services and operations.
“In short, there’s a whole handful of opportunities to reduce costs. That’s being reflected in current tender documents. Across the world in countries such as Russia, the USA and Chile, procurement authorities are requesting complete packages, not discrete solutions.
“That pushes another synergy – with V2X. We at Kapsch have been very active in 5.9GHz technology, producing in-vehicle equipment and roadside transceivers which will allow cooperative vehicles to exchange data. In some respects there was a gap in the back office capability but the Transdyn acquisition fills this. Proliferation of the necessary technology within the vehicle fleet might take some time but we’re now positioned to be able to say to road operators and concessions who know this technology is on the way that they can start now to prepare for its arrival or can procure systems which offer them a clear migration path from a ‘conventional’ solution to a future V2X one.”
Global standards
The acquisition of an ATMS specialist from North America, where the National Transportation Communications for ITS Protocol (NTCIP) holds sway, poses questions in terms of standards in a global context.Ummenhofer: “Standards are undoubtedly a concern. In German-speaking countries, for instance, the TLS standard, though dated, is still common. Across Europe, we have DATEX2 on strategic roads and other, more urban-centric standards such as UTMC. To be successful internationally, we have to be adaptable. NTCIP is a modern, IP-based standard and, where customers have no preference, of course we’re going to offer guidance. But migration of DYNAC is a straightforward affair. Through its activities in international markets Transdyn already has staff well-versed in interfacing with established and stable standards and it’s an area that we’re going to be offering even more support to as we ramp up the global presence.”
Deeper and deeper
As time passes, he sees the current convergence trend not only continuing but also maturing and becoming more profound.“Kapsch will retain its core expertise as a tolling vendor but our current activities aren’t just an effort to increase our potential, they’re part of moves to address demand with a competitive portfolio. We follow the market – of course we do, that’s a philosophical issue – but the demand in tenders for broader, bigger solutions is also driving the market.
“Convergence will continue in a step-wise manner. What we have now is the early stages and the coming together of stand-alone applications. But that’ll tighten and my example of a single-source, seamless ETC/ATMS solution provides a glimpse of how that will happen. That next-stage ‘tightening’ will be influenced by such things as V2X and by related standards such as those for 5.9GHz-based communications.
“We’ll reach a stage where we have an open vehicle Telematics platform which uses the same roadside systems for applications which remain unintegrated at present. The back office systems are already there to support this.
“All that’s within the next five years or so. Further out, given the rate of development we’re experiencing now, predicting where we’ll be would be a rather fanciful undertaking.”
