March/April 2005

One of the keys to dynamic vehicle management these days is to be able to feed real-time traffic flow information into your planning, navigating and scheduling applications.

Telcontar, the big US-based specialist in location-based services, reckons it's just made this task easier with the launch of a product called Traffic Manager 3.0. This aims to integrate real-time traffic flow and incident information seamlessly into location-based services.

The company says that when the product is integrated with its Drill Down Server (DDS) geo-spatial software platform, it can enhance the value of Internet-based mapping, direction and local searching, mobile phone-based navigation and telematics applications.

The company says incidents can be displayed on a map, routes can be generated on the basis of current traffic flows, and alternative routes can be produced on the basis of real-time incident information or a specified user profile.

 

The first release of the new product sounds somewhat US-focused; it supports real-time handling of traffic incident data from Navteq for over 20 major metropolitan areas throughout the US. But the company makes clear that it also supports traffic-feed providers in Europe.