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The article discusses an innovative system for traffic management that is under installation in the city of Valencia, Spain. This new traffic-management system is based on streaming video techniques over a high-speed Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol corporate network. The video-streaming application is a multicomponent distributed application whose main task is managing the distribution of video streams from the video servers to the service processes that execute at the final application servers in the traffic management center (TMC). A tree connecting the three Gigabit Ethernet switches and the L3 switch at the TMC was the core network topology. Since it uses multicast communication, the Video Stream Management Server allows the introduction of several applications and services.

The article describes a multimedia approach to the efficient implementation and use of emergency plans using the subway system of Valencia, Spain as an example. Metro Valencia is the public company that manages the railway transportation in the Valencia metropolitan area. In 1998, the Metro Valencia Safety Office began developing a system to improve its emergency plan. The Hypermedia Emergency Plan has been operational since June 2000 at the Metro Valencia's Traffic Control Office. Without the Hypermedia plan, emergency procedures are carried out manually. Its advent has greatly streamlined the execution of emergency procedures. Currently, when an emergency occurs, the safety manager interacts with the hypermedia plan instead of the paper-based plan. The solution is applicable to other public service organizations like hotels, stadiums, theaters and even whole cities in case of natural disasters. Although every situation is different, and many specific details must be taken into account, systems supporting emergency management must fulfill two basic requirements. First, they must provide multimedia storage and delivery. Second, they must support advanced, workflow-like navigation of the available information. Based on the experience gathered from the Valencia project, a number of issues have been identified that need attention and further research before safety-oriented systems are widely used. These are process, presentation, information management and retrieval, communication, collaboration and intelligence.