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.”
Visitors to Intertraffic will be the first to see the new Marwis mobile contactless weather information sensor from German company Lufft. Marwis can be mounted on any vehicle and provides mobile collection of road weather information including surface temperature, dew point and water film height as well as road conditions (humidity, snow, ice and frost), grip (friction) and other environmental data.
If you feel like taking a Virtual Drive Through the Future of Transportation, then head for the US DOT booth #1201. The organisation is working with the researchers at the National Advanced Driving Simulator (NADS) at the University of Iowa to develop short driving simulator scenarios demonstrating a variety of vehicle-to-infrastructure, vehicle-to-pedestrian, and vehicle-to-vehicle applications.
Italy’s largest industrial company, oil and gas giant ENI, has asked all its third-party transport operators to use the new EGNOS system, which allows more accurate tracking of dangerous goods in transit. Satellite-based EGNOS improves the accuracy of existing GPS tracking systems, giving a vehicle’s position to an accuracy of one metre, compared to around four metres by GPS alone, said Telespazio’s Antonello Di Fazio at the World Congress yesterday. EGNOS can be installed via an overnight software upload.
Moxa, a global provider of industrial automation solutions, will use Intertraffic Amsterdam 2014 to highlight a range of products that enable faster and critical decisions on road traffic events with highly efficient real-time solutions that enable network convergence and edge-to-core continuity. The company says its industrial networking solutions deliver dynamic mixes of voice, video and data in up to 10GbE speed, as well as resilient ring technology, that allows extensible transmission up to 120km and gu