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.”
Signpost Solutions is showing its new Optimast range of passively safe sign masts. The range is constructed from round aluminium extrusions in five standard dimensions – 102mm, 127mm, 168mm, 219mm and 244mm, which allows standard fixings diameters and post caps to be used.
Swedish company MetSense will be at Intertraffic Amsterdam to highlight its complete sensor solutions for winter road maintenance, and will present MetSense 2DRoad, a multi-pixel camera system for detection of road status in two dimensions. When installed on a road weather station, the camera system can offer a visual image of one or several lanes of road with a semi-transparent overlay of current road condition, such as dry, wet, ice, or snow, in thousands of points on the road surface.
Telegra has gone to unusual lengths to demonstrate the sealing of its Nextgen series of variable message signs – and has immersed a working panel in a water column on its stand. Sealed to IP67/MENA 6 standard, the panels use groups of three single-coloured LEDs with the light output shaped by a bespoke lens system to enable a wide gamut of colours to be displayed on the signs.
Kapsch is using the ITS World Congress Detroit to show for the first time the company’s V2X end-to-end capabilities by demonstrating the full V2X system integration, incorporated into its Dynac Traffic Management solution. (Communication from Vehicle to Infrastructure (V2I) or vice versa (I2V), or from Vehicle to Vehicle (V2V) is commonly called “V2X”.)
