Sevierville, Tennessee is the hometown of internationally known entertainer Dolly Parton and is a popular gateway to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Located in Eastern Tennessee, the city has a population of 16,500 residents and is visited by 16 million tourists per year. In 2013, the city purchased VTScada for monitoring of their water and wastewater infrastructure. Since successfully implementing that system, the city investigated other ways to maximize the benefit from their investment across their organization. They discovered they could use VTScada to help with some traffic concerns by putting it in the middle of several different technologies that would not typically be able to share data with each other.
Getting the Most From SCADA Software in Sevierville, TN
What else can our SCADA do?
Eric Itzel, Assistant IT Administrator at Sevierville, maintains operations in network and critical systems, including SCADA system for water, wastewater, and traffic systems. Their citywide traffic system had a problem, “The system was assembled with advanced products from different vendors that were all independently using the same Ethernet network to poll system status and efficiency data into individual software platforms. There was no mechanism to easily view the information from the individual platforms using a single interface,” explains Itzel.
Open Connectivity
“VTScada has built-in support for the communication protocols used by the individual software and hardware components in the traffic system, so it was just a matter of building the application to poll each subsystem and aggregate the data into the VTScada Historical Data Viewer (HDV) for further analysis and reporting.” Itzel continues.
“It’s very much a work in progress, but the current application aggregates traffic data (volume and speed) from three different platforms into a single application. In addition, it gives real-time hardware and system status, including appliance health data such as temperature and voltage. The individual OEM software packages support these features individually, but VTScada gave us cross-platform scalability.”
In this trend group, the black line represents 15 minute southbound traffic volumes polled from Gridsmart*. The red line is southbound travel time from the intersection of Winfield Dunn Pkwy & SR448 to Winfield Dunn Pkwy & Main St. in seconds. The green line is travel time from Winfield Dunn Pkwy & Main St to the intersection at southern end of Forks of the River Parkway.
Traffic Control Hardware
“We have integrated NTCIP 1202 compatible ATC traffic controllers with Ethernet communications, Gridsmart vehicle detection technology and our on-premise BlueTOAD travel time system into the VTScada application,” continues Itzel. “We are using a combination of wireless and fiber optic connections to communicate with the traffic system.” They run a monthly report they have created in VTScada to tie the traffic volume data into their traffic counts web application.
Integrated Mapping
Integrated VTScada ‘Slippy’ Maps allow the city to view the traffic map without any additional configuration.
Software Support
Itzel finishes with, “Trihedral’s support has answered every question objectively and were supportive of the application, even though it isn’t what the product is most known for. “
Find out more about Sevierville, Tennessee!
*GRIDSMART is the world’s only single camera solution for intersection actuation, traffic data collection, and situational awareness: www.gridsmart.com