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Research Archive

Research Progress & Insights Research Plan

Track 1: European Union Collaboration

Research Accomplishments

The US and EU have established a Joint ITS Technical Task Force as well as Working Groups that are co-led and staffed by representatives of the US DOT and the EU. The working groups include:

  • Safety Applications Working Group: Focuses on supporting the development of cooperative safety applications by defining a common agreement among car manufacturers on specific standards/parameters to harmonize between the regions.
  • Sustainability Applications Working Group: Focuses on identifying, researching, quantifying, and evaluating the environmental benefits of an ITS application or scenario that would improve the operation and performance of an environmentally optimized transportation network.
  • Standards Harmonization Working Group: Focuses on encouraging and fostering the development and adoption of globally harmonized open standards for ITS cooperative systems.
  • Assessment Tools Working Group: Focuses on establishing a fundamental foundation to facilitate a common level of analysis capabilities, comparison of field operational tests, and exchange of data and information regarding test and evaluation of cooperative systems.
  • Driver Distraction and Human-Machine Interaction Working Group: Focuses on identifying opportunities for research collaboration, aligning research, and identifying differences in the area of driver distraction and human-machine interaction.
  • European Technical Roadmap Working Group: Focuses on producing a document to review the current state of the development of cooperative systems in Europe and plans for future development and deployment.
  • Glossary Working Group: Focuses on establishing and publishing the common working definitions for the key terms and concepts to facilitate mutual understanding in ongoing discussions within the EU-US Task Force.

The revised planned contents of the EU Cooperative Awareness Message (CAM) have been harmonized with the contents of the US Basic Safety Message (BSM).

Critical Research Insights

Cooperation between the EU and US industry, governments, and standards communities has resulted in a substantially harmonized core safety message set. While the CAM and the BSM are not identical, they are now sufficiently harmonized such that only simple translation is required for systems to utilize both message sets nearly interchangeably. From an industry perspective, this will enable usage of substantially common hardware and software for products destined for both regions, reducing cost and complexity.

Next Steps

The EU and U.S. will create a showcase to share the joint work with the global ITS community at the ITS World Congress in Vienna, Austria in 2012. The showcase will highlight their efforts to harmonize the CAM and BSM.

The harmonized content of the CAM and BSM is expected to be incorporated into the final version of the CAM standard via the European Telecommunications Standardization Institute’s (ETSI) processes with adoption expected in the near future. This harmonized content will also be featured as part of the Car2Car Communication Consortium vehicle demonstration at the ITS World Congress in Vienna.

Track 2: Japan-US Technical Cooperation and Information Exchange

Research Accomplishments

The ITS Program and Japan’s Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport and Tourism (MLIT) have collaborated on:

  • Identifying research and development areas that would benefit from joint development as well as sharing information on ongoing research and development projects, estimated benefits, research outcomes, and results of field demonstrations. Progress has been made in three areas in particular:
    • Information Exchange on Evaluation Methods: The MLIT and the ITS Program have been exchanging information on data collection methodologies and evaluation approaches. In data collection, the exchange has focused on defining the purposes, collection procedures, use, and modeling of data to inform evaluation of projects and systems. On evaluation approaches, the MLIT and the ITS Program are seeking to harmonize approaches in order to have consistent and comparable methods for evaluation. The outcome of this effort is that it expands the amount of data for analysis with similar field tests.
    • Probe Data Exchange: The MLIT has provided the ITS Program with probe data to support the research into consistency of data elements and attributes. Japan has a significant amount of traffic probes — cameras and in-vehicle devices — allowing the MLIT to gather much more precise probe data for managing congestion as well as for improving safety.
    • Standards: Supporting development of globally open standards that ensure interoperability (for more details, see pages 108-113).

The MLIT has joined the EU and US in several working areas.

Critical Research Insights

The ability to establish consistent metrics for probe data is expected to result in a global market for mobility applications, devices, and information service providers.

Next Steps

Define an evaluation framework with MLIT and develop a program plan in 2012.

Begin review of the probe data and joint development of metrics in 2012-2013.