Road Network Operations
& Intelligent Transport Systems
A guide for practitioners!
The staffing level is the number of people required to operate and manage the ITS implementation so that the services are delivered. It needs to be calculated in two ways:
How these two totals are calculated will depend on a combination of the following nine factors:
Not all of these factors will be relevant to every ITS implementation – but those that are will determine the maximum staff requirements needed.
The scope and content of the services provided by the ITS implementation will determine the skills that staff will require to possess in order to operate and manage it. Also the level of responsibility to be assigned to each member of staff will be another factor that determines the level of skill. The ideal member of staff will need to possess the following skills:
If the organisation that operates and manages the ITS implementation decides to carry out its own maintenance activities, then a new set of skills will be needed. These will be more technical and may cover such things as component replacement, component repair and software maintenance. Candidates for these staff positions will either need to have had specialist training, or to be provided with it when they start work. Such training will almost always be available from hardware and software component suppliers, but in the case of software may also be available from other organisations.
The maintenance of the communications networks is often best provided by the communications network provider(s). On occasions access will be needed to their premises and/or equipment, some of which may be used by other network customers. It is often useful to have staff capable of diagnosing communications problems, so that the right network provider can be contacted and given some vital information about the possible nature of the problem.
Getting people with the right skills in ITS as described above may be difficult. There may be several options to resolve this issue, but two of the most obvious are:
Of the two, the first is the short-term solution and may be initially cheaper. In the longer term, training local people is the answer, even if it is more expensive initially. There are many organisations that offer suitable training, and sometimes it can be included in the contracts for suppliers and/or system integrators. Many of them will provide the training either at their own premises, or in the location where ITS is being implemented. The acquisition of experience in communications is probably best left as an issue for the communications providers to resolve.