Development of the Visualization Tool for the VMS Emulator System
Jung-Sook Kim
School of Smart IT, Kimpo University, 98, Gimpodaehak-ro, Wolgot-myun, Gimpo-si, Geyonggi-do, Korea
Keywords: Visualization Tool, Automatic Variable Text Message Generator System, VMS (Variable Message Signs),
Real-time, Scheduling Policy, VMS Emulator.
Abstract: In this paper, we design and implement the visualization tool for the VMS (Variable Message Signs) emulator
which can generate the data fields for the variable text message frame and can generate the window controls
such as RadioButton, TextBox, ComboBox, and etc automatically in order to input the valid data value for
the instances of variable data using the visualization tool. A variable message signs, often abbreviated VMS,
is an electronic traffic sign often used on roadways to give travelers information about special events.
However, VMS has the different sizes and shapes according to the city scene and the road types and it has to
display the variable text message in real-time. And a VMS manufacturer must produce the different products
according to each order made. In addition that, they should test and check the correct operation to each VMS
order made goods using the variable message frame. That is very time and workers consuming and VMS
emulator with automatic variable text message generator system and real-time scheduling using visualization
tool is necessary.
1 INTRODUCTION
In urban areas, VMS are used within parking
guidance and information systems to guide drivers to
available car parking spaces. They may also ask
vehicles to take alternative routes, limit travel speed,
warn of duration and location of the incidents or just
inform of the traffic conditions. The information
comes from a variety of traffic monitoring and
surveillance systems. It is expected that by providing
real-time information on special events on the
oncoming road, VMS can improve vehicles’ route
selection, reduce travel time, mitigate the severity and
duration of incidents and improve the performance of
the transportation network (http://en.wikipedia.org,
2015), (Operations office of travel management,
1999), (J.S. Kim, 2014), (Y. J. Joo, 2012), (O. H.
Kwon, 2011), (J.H. Kim, 2014). However, VMS has
the different sizes and shapes according to the city
scene and the road types and it has to display the
variable text message according to the predefined
scheduling policy in real-time. And the VMS
manufacturers have to produce the different products
according to each order made. In addition that, they
should test and check the correct operation to each
VMS order made goods using the variable text
message frame. But, they don’t have the test data and
they must go an operational data center, the Highway
agency, or the relevant Government Regional Office
to get the test data. That is very time and workers
consuming. In order to solve the problem, a VMS
emulator system is necessary. The VMS emulator
system with automatic variable message generator
system has the following functions; 1) generates the
data fields for the variable message frame; 2) filled
out the valid data value into data field that has various
data types and variable data sizes; 3) communication
method from server to client vice versa; 4) scheduling
policy and method in real-time. In this paper, we
design and implement the visualization tool for the
VMS emulator with automatic variable message
generator which can generate the data field which
consists of the variable message frame and can
generate many kinds of window controls in order to
input the valid data value for the instances of data
field easily using the visualization tool. As the result,
a manufacturer of VMS does not need to go the field
or data center to get the variable message frame for
testing the VMS order made goods. The organization
of this paper is as follows. Section 2 describes a
related work and Section 3 proposes a visualization
tool for the VMS emulator on the windows
environment. In Section 4, we show the experiment
results. Finally, conclusions and future work are
presented in Section 5.
493
Kim J..
Development of the Visualization Tool for the VMS Emulator System.
DOI: 10.5220/0005557104930497
In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Informatics in Control, Automation and Robotics (ICINCO-2015), pages 493-497
ISBN: 978-989-758-123-6
Copyright
c
2015 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)
2 RELATED WORK
A variable- (also changeable-, electronic-, or
dynamic-) message sign, often abbreviated VMS,
CMS, or DMS, and in the UK known as a matrix sign,
is an electronic traffic sign often used on roadways to
give travelers information about special events. Such
signs warn of traffic congestion, accidents, incidents,
roadwork zones, or speed limits on a specific highway
segment. In urban areas, VMS are used within
parking guidance and information systems to guide
drivers to available car parking spaces. They may also
ask vehicles to take alternative routes, limit travel
speed, warn of duration and location of the incidents
or just inform of the traffic conditions. A complete
message on a panel generally includes a problem
statement indicating incident, roadwork, stalled
vehicle etc.; a location statement indicating where the
incident is located; an effect statement indicating lane
closure, delay, etc. and an action statement giving
suggestion what to do traffic conditions ahead. These
signs are also used for AMBER Alert and Silver Alert
messages. In some places, VMSs are set up with
permanent, semi-static displays indicating predicted
travel times to important traffic destinations such as
major cities or interchanges along the route of a
highway. The information comes from a variety of
traffic monitoring and surveillance systems. It is
expected that by providing real-time information on
special events on the oncoming road, VMS can
improve vehicles' route selection, reduce travel time,
mitigate the severity and duration of incidents and
improve the performance of the transportation
network (Operations office of travel management,
1999).
3 THE VISUALIZATION TOOL
FOR THE VMS EMULATOR
The VMS emulator has the following functions; 1)
automatic variable text message generator system; 2)
real-time scheduling policy; 3) communication
method from server to client vice versa. To be
effective, a VMS must communicate a meaningful
message that can be read and understood by motorists
within a very short time period. And message design
involves recognition of the basic principles for the
following: 1) Message content refers to specific
information displayed on a VMS. 2) Message length
refers to rather the number of words or the number of
characters and spaces in a VMS message. 3) Message
load refers to the amount of information in the total
message, usually expressed in terms of units of
information. 4) Unit of informational refers to the
answer to a question a motorist might ask. 5) Message
format refers to the order and arrangement of the units
of information on a VMS (Operations office of travel
management, 1999). An example text message frame
for VMS contains many data fields such as STX,
LOCAL ID, FRAME NO, TOTAL FRAME NO,
MAIN OPCODE, SUB OPCODE, DATA SIZE,
DATA, CRC, and ETX. The following figure 1 shows
the variable message frame examples. As you can see
the figure 1, the second message frame represents
2bytes for data field but the forth message frame is
4bytes.
Figure 1: An example of variable message frame.
As you can see the example, the text message
frame has two kinds of data fields. The first kind of
data field has the fixed data type and data size.
Another has the various data type and variable data
size in a message frame. Easily speaking, the data
field has various data type and variable data size. And
we need the automatic controls generator system
which can be used to input the various data type and
variable data size of the data field using the
visualization tools. In order to generate the variable
text message frame automatically, we must generate
the data fields of text message frame on the table into
a database using visualization tool. After that, the user
must fill out the instances of the data fields with valid
value in the table. At this time, the user should know
the exact data type and data size. That is not easy
because the data fields have various data types of the
instances of the data and have variable data size of the
instance of the data. And the visualization tool is
necessary to fill out the instances of data easily and
exactly. At first, we developed the visualization tool
to generate the variable text message frame. It can
ICINCO2015-12thInternationalConferenceonInformaticsinControl,AutomationandRobotics
494
generate a message frame which contains many data
fields. The user filled out a frame name in the frame
‘textbox’ and presses the ‘add’ button on the window
dialog. After that, the user adds the data fields of the
message frame orderly. Secondly, we developed the
visualization tool to fill out the instances of variable
data part exactly and efficiently. The instances of data
should be decided when the user input all data value
using the window controls of the visualization tool.
And the scheduler operates on the predefined
schedule. So, it makes the events according to
scheduling policy. And you must establish the
efficient scheduling policy. After that, you can set the
required condition parameters to operate the
scheduler. If the condition of the scheduler is time
interval, then you must set the starting time and the
time interval. The emulator system for variable
message signs is composed of client/server model.
The client is various information services panel and
the server is for controlling the system and it supports
the seven functions which are a message processor, a
message generator, a message sender, a job
configurator, a job scheduler, a message configurator,
and a message logger. The following figure 2 shows
the emulator system structure.
Figure 2: Ststem structure.
4 IMPLEMENTATION AND
RESULTS
We have implemented a VMS emulator to generate
the variable text message frame automatically using
C# language based windows environment. The figure
3 shows a window dialog for setting the data fields to
generate the variable text message frame using
visualization tool. This is for BIS (Bus Information
System) in Korea.
Figure 3: A parameter setting window.
As you can see figure 4, you can generate the
variable text message frame automatically and easily
because you just put several parameters and click the
buttons in a window dialog which is for setting the
parameters using visualization tool. As a result, the
variable message frame is generated what you want
to be.
Figure 4: The control list.
The following figure 5 shows the result for
generating controls using visualization tool for the
input of the valid data value of the text message frame
data field on the dialog.
In figure 6, you can see the generated window co
ntrols such as TextBox, RadioButton, ComboBox, an
DevelopmentoftheVisualizationToolfortheVMSEmulatorSystem
495
d etc in order to input the valid data value for the var
iable data field. The data size of data field is 52 bytes
and the kind of data types are 15 data types or more.
This result shows an example for BIS in Korea.
Figure 5: The result window dialog.
Figure 6: The generated controls.
The following figure 7 shows a dialog window for the
connection of a client and the server of the VMS
emulator. The client display the text message on the
panel and the server generates the text message and
send it to the client using TCP/IP socket connection.
Figure 7: The connection result.
5 CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE
WORK
VMS has the different sizes and shapes according to
the city scene and it has to be displayed by different
message on the display device in real-time. And VMS
manufacturers must produce the different products
each order made. In this paper, we design and
implement the visualization tool for the VMS
emulator which can generate the data field for the
variable text message frame and can generate controls
in order to input the valid data value for the instances
of data field easily using the visualization tool. As the
result, a manufacturer of VMS does not need to go the
field or data center to get the variable text message
frame for testing of the order made goods. In the
future work, we will study more efficient real-time
scheduling policy for the VMS emulator.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This work (Grants No. C0146186) was supported by
Business for Cooperative R&D between Industry,
Academy, and Research Institute funded Korea Small
and Medium Business Administration in 2013.
REFERENCES
http://en.wikipedia.org/variable-message_sign.
ICINCO2015-12thInternationalConferenceonInformaticsinControl,AutomationandRobotics
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Operations office of travel management, 1999, Changeable
Message Sign Operation and Messaging Handbook,
Federal Highway Administration.
Jung-Sook Kim, 2014, Development of the VMS Emulator
System, International Journal of Control and
Automation, Vol. 7, No. 11, pp. 323-330.
Y. J. Joo, C. H. Ham, 2012, Quality Control Scheme of GIS
– based Bus Network for Stabilization of BIS –
Focusing on Real-time Public Transportation
Information, Journal of KOGSIS, Vol. 20, No. 1, pp.
33-41.
O. H. Kwon, Y. L. Jang, S. Y. Go, S. G. Baik, 2011, The
Development of Traffic Information Service System for
Underground Highway, Proc. 2011, No. 2, pp. 165-171.
J. H. Kim, H. Jin, S. C. Kim, 2014, Design of Adaptive
Vehicular Agents Model, International Journal of
Control and Automation, Vol. 7, No. 7, pp. 415-422.
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