At the beginning of the 21st century
Madrid was a very congested city, and the City Council had to tackle different projects to improve traffic and serious pollution problems.
One of the solutions
that the Madrid City Council strongly opted for was to bury part of the M30 ring road. The construction project of more than 48 km of tunnels was divided into 9 contracts with different construction companies. Furthermore, SICE was appointed to build the control centre and unify and integrate all the required facilities into a single project. It was the largest urban tunnel project in the world to date, with very significant challenges to face.
Previous experiences in intelligent traffic and tunnel control systems were
designed and implemented for the DGT and the Ministry of Development. But, in addition, in the last few years, SICE successfully centralised the management of different urban tunnels in Madrid and provided the most innovative technology for the surface traffic signalling of the M30.
One of the challenges of this project was its magnitude. It was required to design and manage the equipment of 48 km of tunnels with unified systems in coordination with the different construction companies involved in the process. The project was completed in record time, just 18 months, thanks to the work of more than 500 professionals, including SICE's own personnel and subcontractors.
Centralisation of the systems
In such a complex project, it was essential to carry out a design by following the security requirements of all the agents involved: emergency systems, national and local police, firefighters, maintenance teams, etc. They advised SICE to specify and measure the equipment's size and how it would work. Afterwards, all the systems were centralised through a sophisticated communications network in the SICE's in-house SIDERA software.
The intelligent Sidera software,
the equipment it controls and the operating policies it establishes aim to ensure safety and thus reduces the accidents in tunnels by limiting risks and facilitating the fastest and most effective response to possible incidents. At the same time, it seeks to short up travel times, and therefore reduce pollution levels. The energy systems, lighting, ventilation, dynamic traffic management, video and incident detection, manual and automatic extinction, access control, filtering and variable signalling are just some of the 37 different systems projected and installed in the tunnel, which offer continuous and real-time information to the control centre.
Improving the system
The system has been constantly updated with the technological advances developed over the last few years and is currently being renewed to include technical improvements based on Artificial Intelligence, Prognosis and Big Data, among others.
Thousands of agents and administrations worldwide have visited Madrid Calle30, the world's leading benchmark for urban tunnels.
This project positioned SICE as a key leader in the roads control management systems international market. Different tunnel control projects in Seattle, Miami, Auckland Sydney and Stockholm confirm SICE's leadership in this sector.
Comprehensive management
The data is processed in the intelligent software, SIDERA (and its cloud version, SIDERA AWS), a system that considers the causes, consequences and possible responses to all the foreseen events in the various sections of the tunnels.
The comprehensive management of SIDERA allows planning an automated response to act in the shortest possible time to each event reducing the risks. Depending on each incident, the information required is sent from the control centre to the user, to the emergency teams or systems in general for coordinated action.