The National Transportation Communications for Intelligent Transportation Systems Protocol defines a set of standards called NTCIP that contain a composite application layer protocol, called Transportation Management Protocol (TMP) designed specifically for the management of transportation systems. The Transportation Management Protocol consists of three component protocols:

• the IETF standard Simple Network Management Protocol version 1 (SNMPv1) – provides for flexible management object exchange with each object being uniquely identified.
• the Simple Transportation Management Protocol (STMP) – provides for dynamic, simple grouping of data objects, defined at run-time, that is referred to with a single group identifier.
• the Simple Fixed Message Protocol (SFMP) – provides for fixed, composite data object, that is referred to with a single, simple identifier.

All three protocols provide the same base services but are designed for different needs, device complexity, and communications bandwidth of the specific system. Essentially, each component protocol maximizes two of the three requirements of simplicity, flexibility, and minimal packet size at the expense of the third requirement.

NTCIP standards aim to achieve equipment interoperability and interchangeability to facilitate coordination and information sharing among the parties connected to the Transportation Networks.

For more information about the NTCIP project, the TMP protocol and to access the source standard documents please refer to the Association of Electrical Equipment and Medical Imaging Manufacturers (NEMA) and to the NTCIP web sites.

NuDesign offers the following software development tools and libraries for embedded and desktop target systems, aiding developers of applications requiring NTCIP Transportation Management Protocol agent or manager functionality:

• Visual MIBrowser, the SNMPv1/v2c management application, is an essential tool in the development and testing phases. Includes scripting capability for generating agent specific test cases. Many sample test scripts are included with the tool.
• Visual SNMP Traffic Monitor, an easy to use application that provides capture, custom filtering, decoding, storage and retrieval for later review of SNMP exchanges. The data is parsed and displayed using object’s MIB names.
• Visual MIBuilder, is an application for visually building your system’s management objects model (MIB) in SMIv1/v2 syntax.
• C++ SNMP Agent Studios for Windows / for Desktop Linux / for Embedded RTOS’es, these products contain SNMPv1/v2c development libraries and SNMP Agent code generators that automatically build target SNMP Agents for selected MIBs and project files for selected development environments. The SNMP Agents built with these tools can be simple, monolithic exe running in one thread or SNMP Master Agents with Local and / or Remote Subagents supporting multithreading architecture.

The SNMPv1 protocol standard is at the core of the NTCIP Transportation Management Protocol suite. NuDesign fully supports SNMPv1 and is currently looking to add the other two protocol components, Simple Transportation Management Protocol and Simple Fixed Message Protocol as extra libraries to its tools and applications for the transportation industry NTCIP embedded and desktop applications.

Please contact us for any questions, to download an eval of our SNMP products or to obtain the latest updates on the state of the NTCIP TMP protocol suite.