The CSIR Nyenda programme : traffic management R&D capacity building - balancing the opportunities and constraints

Abstract

Paper presented at the 28th Annual Southern African Transport Conference 6 - 9 July 2009 "Sustainable Transport", CSIR International Convention Centre, Pretoria, South Africa.

The CSIR's NyendaWeb programme is developed to provide support to the road safety and traffic management fraternity particularly to efforts aimed at stopping the carnage on South African roads and then also to achieve sustainability in transport (SATC, 2008). NyendaWeb harnesses Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) in its various forms of implementation and is developed as an open source instrument to facilitate improved collaboration among transport researchers, managers and operations, and to enhance reciprocal data accessibility. Concurrently, the NyendaWeb project, as part of the CSlR ITS Lab Collaboratory, is establishing an international platform for collaborative research and development as well as capacity building in ITS and Traffic Management. At the functional level it was to ultimately also provide a neutral transport data integrative and fusion platform that is particularly suitable for environments with disparate and incoherent ITS deployments.The NyendaWeb has moved from just a concept to a practical tool of which the functionality can now be expanded. This paper deliberates NyendaWeb's potential to rapidly grow in its usefulness to the transport/ITS industry and the constraints on further development. On the one hand the industry consists of many disparate entities that are not naturally collaborative despite integrative transport policy intents. On the other hand, the implementation of ITS technologies creates data rich environments that can contribute significantly to improved transport management and operations from company level to the level of national government, including end-users. Utilising such data, presents a new paradigm of opportunities to the transport and traffic management fraternity - both technologically and institutionally.The first part of this paper considers aspects of the need for the special skills required for this paradigm and then the role of the Nyenda Programme to increase current capacity to do the necessary R&D and to expand the collaborative effort towards a more inclusive stakeholder cadre.In the second part of the paper, an update of the NyendaWeb technological development is provided including a practical example of the NyendaWeb data integrative capability. The paper concludes with views on the way forward with the Nyenda Programme