Britain’s busiest motorways rely on a variety of technologies to manage the flow of traffic, but to manage the technology, a rugged and reliable network is required. IT4Automation’s world-class, managed design with remote access is vital for the safe and smooth-running operation of some of the UK’s busiest motorways.
The challenge in this case was to provide resilient communications, redundant communications, between all of those places, interfacing with existing tunnel control systems that were maintained by other third parties.
Security was a massive issue. We didn’t want anyone being able, for example, to take over the motorway signage for their own purposes. Equally, we didn’t want any contractor who was doing something on one system accidentally causing a problem with another. We needed to ensure the network was segmented by both application and location.
A further need that was identified at an early stage was remote maintainer access. If you have systems like CCTV, as well as systems controlling signage and the blowers ventilating the tunnels – all sorts of different applications, often run by different organisations – you have to provide each one of those organisations with access to the equipment for which they are responsible, but not to anyone else’s. We had to design our network to allow that to happen.’
IT4A’s remote access solution had to meet the design constraints and testing requirements set out by Highways England and managed through the Code of Connection (CoCo) – a risk based network security methodology. Without a CoCo in place for the control and monitoring networks, we would not be allowed to use the National Road Telecommunication System (NRTS) – the Highways England Data Network Infrastructure.