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.”
The Aimsun Online real-time decision support system for traffic management will take centre stage at the TSS-Transport Simulation Systems stand. Its dynamic, high-speed simulation of large areas allows traffic operators to accurately forecast the future network flow patterns that will result from a particular traffic management or information provision strategy.
Increased road safety is claimed for a novel system from Ninghai Qinghua Electrical designed to improve the conspicuity of guard rails. This solar powered lighting system can be mounted on top of the barrier and features reliable LED technology, using flashing to ensure drivers can see the barriers clearly from a distance or in poor weather conditions with heavy rain or fog.
German company SVS-Vistek designs and manufactures a wide range of innovative CCD and CMOS cameras, from VGA up to 29 megapixel resolution, for many industrial machine vision and traffic applications.
ITS Romania will host on its stand a live eCall demonstrator that will present the eCall system implemented at national level during the Harmonised eCall European pilot project. eCall enables a vehicle to automatically dial Europe’s 112 emergency phone number in case of a severe accident, while sending a Minimum Set of Data to the most appropriate Public Service Answering Point (PSAP). The Romanian eCall live demonstrator will show how an eCall is being handled by the 112 PSAP. This will be done by setting
