ITS TEST BEDS

Common building blocks for ITS test beds and field operational tests

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 Obiettivo del progetto (Objective)

'In the next ten years, traffic by passenger cars is expected to grow by 30% while goods traffic is expected to go up by 60%. During the same time ambitious targets have been formulated in terms of safety, congestion and protection of the environment. To accommodate this, the deployment of Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS), or the use of ICT infrastructure to complement road infrastructure and realise the vision of the connected vehicle, needs to be accelerated. Intelligent Transport Systems use existing communication infrastructure and their future evolutions to deliver a quasi unlimited list of applications and services. These vary from emergency call (eCall) and intelligent speed adaptation (ISA) to vehicle-to-vehicle collision warning and intersection collision avoidance. Together these will have an unprecedented impact on safety, traffic fluidity, security and the environment. When fully deployed, this new ecosystem will also generate tens of thousands of jobs in Europe, many of which will be at SMEs as their flexibility, drive and innovation capability is needed to fill in many of the new roles. Regional and national test beds – where companies collaborate on all aspects of the future ITS ecosystem are needed as a key intermediary step to facilitate deployment. SMEs cannot set-up such test beds alone, but associations of SMEs such as the national ITS associations are very well placed to do so or facilitate that it is done. To prepare for these test beds and FOTs, there is a need for top research providers that have been involved in the European research programmes to combine existing components into such a test bed and assess it, before it is made widely available as a starting point to any national ITS association. Doing so at the European level will not only help ensure interoperability, but will also facilitate that developments are rapidly taken-up by all 22 national ITS associations that are today already informally working together within this domain.'

Introduzione (Teaser)

New technologies that enable road vehicles to communicate with each other and their environment promise to enhance safety and reduce traffic.

Descrizione progetto (Article)

Intelligent transport systems (ITSs) that support real-time communication between vehicles are promising to relieve congestion and enhance safety. Already, the technology, which uses cellular networks, radio systems and short-range wireless solutions, has been developed, and is now ready for extensive testing in the lab and on the road. This requires field operational tests (FOTs) that involve a large number of vehicles and drivers to foster debate, advance investments and deal with privacy issues in vehicle identification.

The EU-funded project 'Common building blocks for ITS test beds and field operational tests' (ITS TEST BEDS) aimed to establish FOTs in Europe to advance this technology. It sought to ensure interoperability among systems in different EU states so that vehicles interact in the same way across the continent, involving national research centres in this endeavour.

More specifically, the project team designed the ITS test beds infrastructure and built a prototype based on existing European research and results of interactive workshops. Once the test beds were defined, the team consolidated the results under a non-profit company called Telematics Incubator to facilitate demonstration of the concept's feasibility. The project then conducted tests and enabled small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to gain access to the project results through a dedicated online portal.

Testing results and topics published online include hazard warning systems, signal processing enhancements, time measurements, software development and hardware enhancements. In brief, the new infrastructure has helped prepare different European stakeholders take ITSs to the next level.

The project's progress has helped standardise interfaces across the system to help SMEs penetrate this new market. All stakeholders, from service centres that receive crucial data to cellular telecommunication companies, stand to benefit from the standardised work in the field and publication of results.

While it will take several years before ITS services are fully deployed, the infrastructure is now in place to take road transport to the next level, facilitating licensing and exploitation. Better road safety, enhanced traffic management and a cleaner environment are expected to emerge from this sophisticated technology.