As visitors to the Q-Free booth at the ITS World Congress Detroit will see, the company has transformed its portfolio, shifting from a predominant focus on tolling to cover all aspects of road operations – financing, condition monitoring, real-time management and emerging cooperative ITS applications.
September 7, 2014
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Transforming the portfolio: Jenny Simonsen of Q-Free
As visitors to the 108 Q-Free booth at the ITS World Congress Detroit will see, the company has transformed its portfolio, shifting from a predominant focus on tolling to cover all aspects of road operations – financing, condition monitoring, real-time management and emerging cooperative ITS applications.
With the event being staged in Detroit, it provides Q-Free with an opportunity to highlight its appreciable presence in the North American market. Recently it acquired 5660 Open Roads Consulting, a specialist in advanced transportation management and traveller information systems that operates mission-critical traffic systems and undertakes video-based surveillance of critical assets in 30 states across the US.
Previously, Q-Free bought 7045 TCS International, a US-based, international supplier of advanced parking guidance systems. Meanwhile, Dacolian USA, another Q-Free group company, is North America’s major supplier of automatic number plate recognition and vehicle signature recognition image processing software.
Nevertheless, says Thomas Falck, CEO, these developments have to be considered in an international context: “The North American region will play an increasing part in our future but it is the international nature of our business which remains one of our core strengths. We will be keen to demonstrate at the 6456 ITS World Congress that with offices around the world, we have a huge range of talent and experience on which to draw. This means we can create solutions which benefit from the best of global practice but which, nevertheless, are closely tailored to local needs.”
Flir will use the ITS World Congress to highlight its new FC-Series T thermal imaging cameras which the company says are ideal, and affordable, tools for traffic monitoring applications. They produce high image quality, are easy to install and designed for use in harsh environments. Just like all Flir thermal imaging cameras, the FC-Series T works perfectly together with video analytics, and can be used for applications including vehicle detection at intersections, road side monitoring, monitoring traffic i
German company 3D-Kennzeichen is claiming a world first for its 3D car number plate made of special plastics. The 3D characters are applied by newly-developed stick-and-stamp technology to provide durable and tamper-proof mounting. The company claims the plate provides superior properties because the flexible, elastic material cannot be dented easily, nor does the product corrode. 3D-Kennzeichen claims the new car plate overcomes all negative aspects of former plastics approaches.
Banner Engineering, a global leader in sensing technology, will use the ITS World Congress to present a wide range of sensors to detect vehicles for various applications. For instance, the company’s Array products have been used for more than a decade for vehicle classification at toll booths. Being highlighted at the World Congress will be the company’s Mini-Array and EZ-Array measuring light curtains that can sense the profile of any class of vehicle.
Reducing damage to vehicles and their passengers in impacts with street furniture is the object of a new type of mounting being shown by Spanish company Sistemas Palazón. Despite the huge sums of money spent by car manufacturers on improving the safety of their vehicles, severe damage can still be caused if they hit unyielding objects.
