FLIR Systems is the world leader in the design, manufacturing and marketing of thermal imaging systems for a wide variety of commercial, industrial and government applications.

One of the markets that is rapidly discovering the benefits thermal imaging has to offer is the traffic video detection market. To ensure full presence in this market, FLIR Systems acquired the former Traficon in 2012. The company has been a major player in the traffic market for more than 25 years.

FLIR Intelligent Transportation Systems, as the company is known today, develops, installs and supports a wide variety of hardware and software products to build the most advanced solutions for traffic video detection and monitoring.

Applications include Automatic Incident Detection (AID) on highways and in tunnels, car and bike presence detection at intersections to optimize the traffic lights, pedestrian detection at pedestrian crossings, traffic flow monitoring and data collection on highways, etc. These systems support safer and optimized traffic flows in tunnels, on highways, on bridges and in cities all over the world.

Flux traffic management server

Flux is an intelligent software platform that is designed to be used with a FLIR video detection system. Flux collects traffic data, events, alarms and video images generated by the hardware video detectors. Flux also offers video management capacity and can control network video recorders, video walls, mobile and fixed cameras. Flux provides a user-friendly interface composed of a monitoring and a reporting application and enables real-time monitoring of events and alarms. The client interface is web-based, thus allowing interaction with Flux on any standard PC workstation.

Flux servers are very powerful, often handling 300+ different sensors on one platform. Multiple servers can be deployed together to provide redundancy for failsafe operation.

A crucial feature for the Flux server is its flexible way of integrating with third-party systems. As incident detection and data collection is only one part of a traffic management system that controls road or tunnel-infrastructure, the information mostly needs to be transferred to a higher level SCADA (Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition) system that also collects information and controls e.g. lighting, ventilation, traffic signaling, control room video walls and many other subsystems. Worldwide, a wide variety of such systems exists, each with distinct features and strengths, built and maintained by either local or international system integrators.

The entire Flux server is written in Java code, supporting both Windows and Linux operating systems. Prosys OPC UA Java SDK library allowed us to add an OPC UA interface to our Flux server with minimum effort. It allowed our development resources to keep focus on their core task: the traffic information processing and storage. Moreover it ensured a 100% standard interface implementation to the various SCADA systems and proper maintenance & updating of it throughout the product life.

Having all gathered data and events available through this interface, system integrators can optimize their system to provide the most efficient information interface for operators, helping them to guarantee smooth traffic at all times and react quickly in case of incidents.

Thanks to Prosys Java OPC UA SDK, we were able to create a standard interface to integrate with a wide variety of customer systems in a very short time, be assured of 100% third-party compatibility and rely on future maintenance for sustaining the product.

Eddy Vermeulen
Product Manager, Flir ITS