Transport modelling company PTV Group has announced an upgrade to its realtime traffic management tool Optima.The software is a transport model updated in real time, giving an overview of what happens on a network in a rolling horizon of 5, 10 or 30 minutes and can predict the effects of, for example, an accident to allow traffic managers to mitigate the worst of the effects minimising congestion and emissions.Optima 17 has what PTV calls "meaningful improvements" that will help better inform citizens.  These improvements include a data interface from SCATS controllers to read traffic counts and traffic light status and an interface to automatically read HERE data, adding to existing support for TomTom and INRIX information.The software also includes an extensiton to Optima Input/Output API to accept lane based traffic counts and to dynamically define corridors and support for OCIT-C as a format for speed and flow input from detectors.And article about PTV Optima will be featured in the next issue of Smart Highways.