UK highway authorities now have an integrated path to digital traffic regulation order (D-TRO) compliance following a partnership between AppyWay, a specialist in kerbside and traffic order management software, and Brightly Software, a Siemens company and provider of enterprise asset management solutions. The collaboration links AppyWay’s Traffic Suite with Brightly’s Confirm platform, allowing local authorities to manage highway assets and the regulatory orders that govern them through a single connected environment.
A Compliance Deadline Driving Urgency
The timing reflects a pressing policy backdrop. Under the Automated Vehicles Act 2024, traffic regulation authorities in England are required to publish new traffic regulation orders in a standardised digital format and submit them to a centralised national repository managed by the Department for Transport. The D-TRO service, which launched in beta in late 2024, is designed to make road restriction data machine-readable and interoperable across systems. Enabling regulations are expected to come into force in 2026, putting councils under growing pressure to have compliant workflows in place before the deadline.
The requirement is partly motivated by the infrastructure needs of autonomous vehicle deployment. Accurate, machine-readable traffic data is a prerequisite for self-driving systems to navigate public roads reliably, and the Act creates the legal obligation for authorities to maintain digitally current records of their restrictions.
What the Integration Covers
AppyWay’s Traffic Suite handles the full lifecycle of traffic regulation orders, from drafting and map-based visualisation through to public consultation and final publication. Authorities can create, amend and submit D-TROs using a cloud-based interface that generates structured, compliant data without requiring technical knowledge from traffic teams. The platform already counts councils including North Tyneside, Cambridgeshire, Southampton and the London Borough of Southwark among its users.
Brightly’s Confirm system, meanwhile, is one of the most widely deployed highway asset management platforms in the UK. It is used by councils to record, inspect and schedule maintenance for road infrastructure including signs, markings, structures and drainage. National Highways renewed an approximately £8 million contract with Brightly for Confirm in 2025, underlining the platform’s entrenched position in UK highway operations. Confirm was originally a UK-based software product before being acquired by Brightly in 2020, which was itself acquired by Siemens in 2022 for approximately $1.575 billion.
The integration connects these two datasets so that a traffic regulation order created in AppyWay can be linked directly to the physical assets recorded in Confirm. A parking restriction, for instance, can be associated with the kerb markings, signage and road furniture that give it legal effect on the ground. Teams planning maintenance or works programmes can cross-reference active orders before scheduling interventions, reducing the risk of conflicts between operational and regulatory activity.
Procurement Simplification as a Driver
Beyond technical interoperability, the partnership addresses a procurement consideration that is increasingly relevant for stretched local authority budgets. Rather than running separate procurement exercises for an asset management system and a traffic order tool, authorities using Confirm will be able to extend into AppyWay’s capabilities through an existing vendor relationship. This aligns with a broader trend in public sector technology procurement toward consolidated platforms and reduced contract fragmentation.
The UK has roughly 150 highway authorities in England alone, each responsible for its own road network and facing the same D-TRO compliance obligation. Many are at varying stages of digital maturity: some have already adopted map-based order management, while others continue to rely on text-based documents, in some cases still produced in word processing software. The AppyWay-Brightly combination offers authorities at different starting points a route to compliance that connects into an existing system rather than requiring wholesale replacement.
Market Context
The D-TRO mandate is shaping a competitive supplier landscape in UK highway technology. AppyWay has positioned its Traffic Suite as a purpose-built compliance tool, reporting that its platform processes orders up to 75% faster than manual workflows. The Southwark case study shows the platform contributed to a 45% increase in digital traffic order output in the first year of deployment compared to the prior year. Brightly, through Confirm, holds substantial installed base across county and unitary authorities, giving the partnership an established distribution channel into councils that are now evaluating their D-TRO options.
The Department for Transport’s centralised D-TRO service operates as a publication endpoint rather than a management environment, meaning authorities still need upstream tools to author and structure their orders. This creates a clear market for integrated solutions that handle the workflow complexity before submission, and positions vendor partnerships like this one as a practical bridge between operational systems and the national repository.
