On June 10, 2022, the directors of the private consortium ATEam and the Management Team of the Province of North Holland determined that the Proof of Concept (PoC) VerkeersManagement as a Service (VMaaS) was successful. With the PoC VMaaS, the companies in ATEam have demonstrated their ability to properly implement traffic management as a service. In a one-year Learning Phase, ATEam will gradually take over the implementation of traffic management from the Province of North Holland, and from June 1, 2023, the Province of North Holland will take performance-based direction from ATEam and phase out its own systems.

The Board of the Province of North Holland decided on May 11, 2021, to purchase the iService VMaaS drawn up in the national program iCentrale by ten governments in collaboration with the Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management and in accordance with national CROW standards.

With the iService VMaaS, the province of North Holland wants to stop performing traffic management itself and say goodbye to its own traffic control center in Hoofdorp and the dozens of its own applications and systems for traffic management that the province currently manages itself, and thus also make an important contribution to the circular economy. The operational staff for carrying out traffic management was already being hired by the province. With the VMaaS iService, the province is taking control in a performance-based way, by defining clear policy objectives for traffic management and leaving the implementation of traffic management to ATEam. The province remains the owner of objects such as (intelligent) traffic lights, DRIPs (Dynamic Route Information Panels), cameras and loops. The data communication connections to these objects are part of the iService VMaaS. Controlling the road inspectors is also part of VMaaS. The province is considering whether public ownership of the objects will remain necessary in the future.

The companies in the ATEam consortium are Arcadis, Trigion and Equans with cooperation from Be-Mobile, Griffid and Enai. They are pooling their expertise and contributing tools developed in-house. Trigion the PAC-1 Monitoring and Response Central (Private M&R Central) and the associated nationally certified control room processes, procedures and systems, Arcadis the years of experience with the implementation of traffic management and a managing agent role, Equans and Enai the technical and control room knowledge, Griffid the knowledge and experience with cameras and Be-Mobile the traffic engineering expertise and their more than 2.5 million Flitsmeister users.

In the PoC, ATEam demonstrated that it meets all of the more than 1,000 requirements that were included in the public tender for the VMaaS iService that the province issued on June 30, 2021, and that ATEam won. The tender took place within the national Framework Agreement iService that the province of Noord-Holland also provided on behalf of the provinces of Utrecht, Flevoland, Zeeland and Overijssel and the municipalities of Almere, Zwolle, Leiden, Dordrecht and Deventer and together with the Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management and CROW within the national program iCentrale in 2020 and for which a total of 35 companies qualified.

During the one-year VMaaS learning phase, the province will gradually disconnect more and more objects from its own traffic center and connect them to ATEam's own traffic center. ATEam controls the objects and performs a baseline measurement itself as a start of the performance-based control of the objects. The province assesses monthly whether ATEam has achieved the agreed performance and pays a fixed monthly fee to ATEam for their services over the entire 10-year term of the VMaaS contract. Continued development of systems, applications, processes and performance as well as annual innovation at the direction of the province and the ATEam itself, are part of this fixed monthly fee. ATEam and the Province implement a structural PDCA (Plan Do Check Act) cycle to have permanent insight into the performance of VMaaS, the status of the Province's own objects and to jointly continue to structurally improve.

Upon completion of the learning phase by June 1, 2023, ATEam will independently execute VMaaS for the province and the province will phase out its own systems including its own traffic center.

With VMaaS, the Province of North Holland expects to realize more performance-based contributions with traffic management at lower monthly costs, to be able to deploy its scarce expert in-house staff on the core tasks of creating and implementing policy and direction, without having to manage and further develop its own increasingly complex systems.

Source: icentrale.nl
Translation: Be-Mobile