The Kansas Department of Transportation (KDOT) has selected Southwest Research Institute to provide the state’s traffic management software solutions. Under a $1.4 million, three-year contract, SwRI will deploy and support the ActiveITS Advanced Traffic Management System (ATMS) for statewide use.

“The unique thing that SwRI’s ActiveITS brings to the table is the ability to share the costs of software development with other states and participate in a user group to share knowledge and features with other ITS professionals,” said Shari Hilliard, the KDOT project manager overseeing the deployment.

Kansas is now among 13 states and U.S. territories that use ActiveITS for traffic management and control of intelligent transportation system (ITS) devices such as signs and cameras. Through SwRI’s flexible licensing agreement, KDOT will get perpetual rights to freely use the software, providing the agency with more control over how it is deployed and customized with support from SwRI engineers and knowledge shared from other state agencies.

“We are proud to support KDOT with a reliable and proven ATMS solution,” said Tucker Brown, the SwRI principal engineer leading the project. “ActiveITS will help Kansas get traffic information and incident response to the public as quickly as possible with integrated and streamlined data on congestion, event information, travel times and weather.”

ActiveITS provides coordinated real-time traffic, safety and weather information to motorists and enables collaboration between traffic managers and other agencies on accidents, construction and traffic flows. Automated response scenarios streamline notification, detection and verification of incidents or traffic management center (TMC) operators, allowing them to provide comprehensive information to motorists as quickly as possible. ActiveITS also provides business intelligence to TMCs through a robust performance management system.

ActiveITS supports deployment on traditional servers, virtual machines or cloud environments —flexibility that helps agencies transfer operations outside of the TMC environment. The software currently manages more than 13,000 consecutive highway miles in over 50 TMC deployments.

“This flexibility to operate in the cloud is especially relevant in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic or natural disasters,” added Dr. Steve Dellenback, vice president of SwRI’s Intelligent Systems Division. “We develop ITS solutions with the future in mind.”

SwRI is also developing machine learning tools that can enhance ActiveITS with automated detection of weather, traffic and speed using existing traffic cameras.

SwRI is an industry leader in intelligent transportation systems including ATMS and integrated corridor management solutions. As an independent, nonprofit, applied research and development organization, SwRI investigates emerging technologies such as machine vision, object detection, automated vehicles, connected vehicle technology and artificial intelligence.

For more information, visit activeits.swri.org