Fife Council Selects APD’s INCA 2 to Improve Winter Road Safety

APD Communications, a global leader in mobile information resource location/tracking and control room solutions, today announced that Fife Council is using INCA 2 technology to improve the road safety of more than 350,000 residents.

INCA 2 will enable the council - one of the largest in Scotland - to increase the productivity of its gritter fleet and protect itself against fraudulent insurance claims. INCA 2 delivers robust in-vehicle access to business critical information with advanced monitoring and control. Fife Council has deployed 30 INCA 2 units across its winter fleet of gritters to ensure vehicle location and tracking is managed effectively. All units use the ECON applet that captures information from the on-board ECON controller including, spread rate, spread width, salt on/off, blast on/off and plough down.

INCA 2’s internal GPRS system enables the gritters to be tracked by the Council to ensure vehicles can be monitored anywhere throughout the Council’s network. This ensures the fleet can be deployed and managed with optimum efficiency with supervisors no longer relying on voice communications to find out where a driver has been.

David Lackie from Fife Council Transportation Services commented: “With Fife Council’s aim to be a top performing council and to deliver ‘best value’ services under ever increasing financial budget constraints we are always keen to take measures to ensure the efficiency of our gritting fleet is maintained and improved. We had previously implemented APD’s original INCA system that successfully monitored the speed and location of our gritters, so upgrading to INCA 2 was an obvious choice to further improve this solution. The new generation of INCA technology supplies us with the timely and accurate information required to ensure the community is provided with safe, well maintained roads throughout the year.”

Fife Council has trialled the INCA 2 system over the last year on a several vehicles and has identified a number of improvements to its day-to-day operations that will be delivered following the full roll out of the INCA 2. Gritting services are now more accurate as the Council can provide exact information in response to public queries, such as when and where gritting needs to take place. The efficiency of the gritters has also been improved through the ability to track the locations of individual vehicles, and determine the most appropriate future routes to take. Maintenance teams can now monitor the speed of its gritters and provide the public with details of what roads have been cleared. Furthermore, INCA’s ‘panic buttons’ have helped improve employees’ safety by sounding an alarm at a depot to signal danger to a driver.

Source: www.apdcomms.com
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