The northern ring road of Lyon is an urban toll roadway stretching about 10 km, including four tunnels, two viaducts, and an interchange. It is mostly used by local commuters, with about 60,000 vehicles per day on the toll sections and 100,000 vehicles per day on the free sections. This busy route connects the western and eastern parts of the city.
Thanks to the open platform software in Lyon’s older video monitoring system, a major update was possible from Milestone Systems, including replacement of analog cameras that had become obsolete. Installing partner Bouygues Energies & Services with HGM Ingénierie knew how to integrate the Milestone VMS with Sprinx AID for automatic incident detection.
Boulevard Périphérique Nord de Lyon
The operating company of the Northern Ring Road of Lyon (Boulevard Périphérique Nord de Lyon or BPNL) has a management contract with the Lyon metropolitan area that requires response to any event within 340 seconds – less than 6 minutes. To ensure continuous mobility, extremely efficient detection of any incident is critical.
Several challenges had to be addressed during the project implementation, especially due to strict operational constraints and the large number of incidents that occur in tunnels. This can be vehicle breakdowns, accidents, pedestrian detections, significant urban traffic surges or numerous other issues to resolve.
BPNL wanted a user-friendly tool allowing easy configuration without requiring highly specialized skills, to improve processes over time, and enhance operator use. They chose to integrate with Sprinx Automatic Incident Detection application (AID) into the Milestone XProtect software, in order to have a single platform delivering more streamlined operations.
BPNL set up a team that works 24/7, monitoring the entire roadway. The solution from Milestone is proving to be highly effective and reliable, with 300 network video cameras covering all traffic zones. They required a robust system, to avoid possible closures that would cause major disruptions to the entire Lyon metropolitan area.
When it came to completing the work, one of the main difficulties was carrying out the upgrades and migration on a live system, since the contractual constraints and geographical situation make it impossible to close down the facilities and road activity.
To overcome this, they migrated the old system to the new one in parallel, which allowed them to validate the cameras progressively. Each time they migrated five or six cameras, they checked the viewing angles and carried out tests at night so as not to disrupt operations.