CalTrans Testbed Center for Interoperability (TCFI)


Mohammad Battah

About ME

My name is Mohammad Battah. I earned Bachelor of Since in Electrical Engineering option Computer from Western New England College class of 1989. I was appointed at Testbed Center for Interoperability (TCFI), within Caltrans, New Technology and Research Program (NT&RP) in 1997.

Background:

Among other things this branch is actively involved with funding, and participating in, university research in the area of Interoperable High speed multimedia networks and their applications to systems used in the communications layer of the National Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) Architecture. Recently, task orders have been executed between UCSB and Caltrans. I am currently involved in two of them. The First task order involves the transmission of Multimedia content (packetized data images and text, voice and video) via various landline and wireless standards-based communications protocols. A specific area within this topic is video segmentation and compression for use in multicast video streaming and video conferencing. TCFI maintains a video conferencing network shown in figure (1), which was established in 1995, for NT&RP and is involved with Caltrans, Communications Systems Committee (CSC) effort to transmit traffic surveillance video between traffic management centers (TMCs) using the MPEG video segmentation and compression standard.

Second, is ITS standards testing The main goal of the ITS standards test process is to provide objective and robust evidence that these standards have practical value in that they lead to interoperable systems.

Multipoint Conference Server (MCS) Upgrade:

The goal of this project was to upgrade the Multipoint Conference Server (MCS) available at (TCFI - UCSB) to be Y2K compliant, improve and add additional capabilities. The following Functionality has been added to the existing MCS:

·        Allow different transmission – receiving rates between different sites.

·        Allow Voice Activated Quadrant.

The Upgrade for the MCS was accomplished by replacing an obsolete hardware and Installing the last software version. The following Components has been changed:

·        Main CPU Board was upgrade from 386 to Pentium I Microprocessor.

·        Add Additional Hard disk.

·        Upgrade the Bridge Processor Unit (BPU) Responsible of Mixing the Video Stream)

·        Upgrade the Inverse Multiplexer Processor Unit (IMPU) this board will handle the setup and tear down call.

The Software Has been upgraded to the latest version and more functionality has been added to it with much easier GUI to use.

ITS Standard Testing:

While there are more than 55 ITS standards, among them 17 critical standards which includes the National Transportation Communications for ITS Protocol (NTCIP). The deployment of ITS will require communications between diverse types of systems. Transportation information and control will have to take place -- both for freeway and road management -- between transportation management centers (TMC’s) and field elements such as traffic signal controllers, variable message signs, and camera controllers. NTCIP is actually a family of communications protocols and object definitions.

Caltrans is committed to using ITS’ standards and protocols in all future installations. At present, none of the field elements use NTCIP compliant protocols. The main reason is the lack of reference implementations that minimize the risk of adopting the NTCIP standards, and provide validated and tested use cases.

My task is to subject the 170/2070 controller software (Written in C) to development activities to Use Case analysis to ensure that we understand the problem domain. Then A requirements object model will be generated to document all the concepts found during analysis, and the relationships between these concepts. Furthermore, an analysis object model will be created that defines the architecture itself and the effort will conclude with a set of specifications, and preparation of a plan for migrating to an NTCIP compliant version At this stage, I was able to analyze the C code for 2070 Controller. I started working in Implementing the Use case Diagram using National Rose Software. I do expect to continue working In this task for the next 9 months.



                                                          Figure (1)