Article on international progress towards common standards for co-operative road infrastructures

Date: 9/12/2009

Source: www.itsinternational.com/

An article in the September / October 2009 Issue of ITS International (pages 56-57) discusses the challenges and progress in creating standards to support co-operative systems at the international level.

It discusses the example of 5.9 GHz-based ITS, where three groups of standardisation bodies are currently developing standards:

• “IEEE is working on 802.11p, a version of the popular WiFi specifications…
• In Europe ETSI is working on car-to-car multi-hopping and geo-addressing standards and CEN TC 278 has recently started working on safety and co-operative applications…
• ISO TC 204 Working Group 16 has written dozens of standards supporting the CALM protocol … and the high-level goal is to provide wide-area communications for ITS applications that work equally well regardless of the communications medium.”

It identifies the key issue:

“The problem is that all of these groups are developing a full set of standards covering all aspects of 5.9 GHz protocol. There are big overlaps in scope and a lot of wasted effort… there is almost no interoperability in the current set of specifications…”

It then suggests the way forward:

“The goal is to get them to agree on a common approach. We must agree a standard architecture and then focus the efforts of each organisation on the areas they are most suited for… Further partitioning of the work is required in order to avoid overlap and waste…”

The article cites research projects as evidence that the technology is now ready for deployment, such as the European CVIS and SAFESPOT and the American IntelliDrive (VII).

Keywords: Cooperative vehicle systems, Project, Safety, Standard