Spruce Database Upgrade & Support

Sheffield City Council invites quotations to upgrade and support the SPRUCE Strategic traffic management software. The Council also invites quotations to provide a SPRUCE development engineer, which can be tendered for just as a separate item.

This is a corner stone piece of technology to provide bus priority and other adaptive traffic control strategies across the city. Under the Department for Transport's UTMC research project UTMC01, "Selected Vehicle Priority" (SPRUCE), a prototype software tool was developed to allow engineers to devise and operate priority signal control strategies for selected vehicles.

Operating on a PC, the tool triggers temporary changes to fixed time Urban Traffic Control (UTC) plans in response to external demands from detectors. The resulting data are transferred to a host UTC system for implementation via the host's communication network.

Simulation tests and field trials have demonstrated the success of this approach within the Sheffield tram network. In 2003 Leeds City Council, who were the lead authority in the UTMC01 project, went through a full procurement process in accordance with European Union protocols to develop a re-engineered version of the prototype SPRUCE software, with considerably more capacity, speed and increased flexibility.

TSEU Ltd won the contract to develop and market SPRUCE/STM. Leeds City Council has invested over £250,000 on this project.

Sheffield City Council has been a partner in this project since the outset and has been involved at all stages in the technical development of SPRUCE. In 2006 Sheffield City Council purchased from TSEU Ltd two Linux based servers both installed with the SPRUCE / STM software. Since that date the ITS Development team at the council have used SPRUCE to develop strategies to provide central bus priority and adaptive traffic control to over 250 sets of traffic signals across the city.