About

Founded in 1968, Tel Aviv, Israel-based Netivei Ayalon (Ayalon Highways) is a governmental company specializing in planning, executing, maintaining, and managing transportation infrastructures. The company provides technology-driven solutions that ease traffic congestion and reduce accidents in Israel’s urban and metropolitan areas. Ayalon Highways provides road-side service with the use of Freeway Service Patrols (FSP) to help reduce accidents and promote safer roads.

Challenge

Ayalon Highways - Route 20 serves as a thruway for millions traveling through Tel Aviv Metropolis and the Gush Dan region. As one of the most heavily trafficked roads in Israel, hundreds of thousands of vehicles utilize this roadway daily. Crashes, incidents, and roadway hazards not only severely delay traffic, at times for hours, but can also cause additional crashes resulting in serious injuries and fatalities. In addition, the recent Fast Lanes Project (construction to expand the existing highway) has eliminated many roadside shoulders exacerbating existing traffic issues. According to Avalon Highways’ head of Traffic Management Division, Israel Shemesh, Ayalon Highways manages approximately 900 incidents a month and the challenge is to know, in real-time, what has occurred on the roadway and to have FSP respond quickly to reduce the potential for further crashes and injury.

Solution

Rekor Command™ has been deployed in Ayalon Highways’ traffic management center. The platform connects several data feeds and automatically sends simultaneous alerts, in real-time, to the traffic control center and FSP staff who respond directly to highway incidents. Now, when FSP arrives on scene they know the number of vehicles involved, the type of incident (crash, stranded vehicle, or roadway debris) and which lanes are affected. This eliminates the need to rely on third-party phone calls to alert roadway incidents, thereby decreasing response time and arming FSP with vital information while en route to the incident.

“We use the Rekor system to connect our inspectors with our FSP and for managing our data. It became one of our main systems in our control room and improved our response time and the ability to find the specific location of events. Every vehicle stopped in a lane or in the shoulder is at a very high-risk for an accident with other vehicles. The response time is important and can really be lifesaving.”

In addition to real-time incident alerting, Mr. Shemesh noted other useful features of Rekor Command which includes the ability to store all incidents under one event log, as well as provide reports and statistical information.

“One of the benefits is the ability of the system to supply and report data which we couldn’t get before. We can now see, according to the data analysis, that our FSPs respond to 100 to 2,000 events each month.”

Conclusion

Rekor Command has improved Ayalon Highways’ response time to roadway incidents, streamlined incident log reporting, and provides valuable statistical information. In the future, plans include expanding the use of Rekor’s solution to their public transportation sector.

“Our control room manages public transportation. The future is synchronization of the system with the bus system, and we aspire that our service level will improve.”

Built on AWS

Rekor Command is powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS). In addition to keeping user data completely secure and protected in the cloud, AWS was chosen due to its reliability and configurability. One feature that benefits greatly from the AWS suite of solutions is Rekor’s automated incident detection feature which is enabled by Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (MSK). Lastly, Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) offers secure, scalable processing and streaming across the entirety of Rekor Command. Features like these make AWS a perfect service provider for teams building Smart City solutions.