The European Commission (EC) and the US Department of Transportation (USDOT) have agreed to cooperate on the harmonization of connected and cooperative vehicle architectures, which will allow for seamless and cross-border smart mobility services.
Initiated during last month’s ITS World Congress in Montreal, the twinning agreement was signed this week by representatives Marcos Pillado, project coordinator of the EU co-funded C-MobILE project and connected vehicles lead at Applus+ IDIADA, and Cliff Heize, project manager of ITS architecture evolution at Iteris. The agreement gives the project teams a clear, shared understanding of the terms of the cooperation, the objectives and outputs to be pursued, and the nature of the teams’ plans for engagement and interaction. While providing greater access to expertise across the Atlantic, the main aim of this agreement is to achieve an improved and harmonized reference architecture that can become the basis for the development of customized, yet interoperable, cooperative intelligent transport systems (C-ITS) deployments.
In Europe, the C-MobILE project is using state-of-the-art communication, road-side architecture, and service delivery technologies and concepts to develop a reference architecture that is both open and secure, and will allow for a range of interoperable C-ITS to be deployed. Meanwhile the US National ITS Architecture Program is working, in conjunction with ITS standards and international architecture and standards cooperation programs, on an efficient, interoperable, secure and cost-effective C-ITS infrastructure and supporting automated vehicle (AV) deployments across North America.
The C-MobILE project recently held a workshop in Bilbao, Spain, organized by the program’s consortium and its local actors, with the aim of developing applications and solutions to deal with specific urban transport challenges. The workshop brought together public authorities, end-users and key mobility stakeholders to validate business models, use cases, and technical and non-technical requirements for C-ITS implementations, as well as to discuss various new services and potential bundles of services.
Participants were presented with 35 use cases for 20 C-ITS services developed by the project consortium, and defined around 450 requirements for large-scale C-ITS implementation in Europe. The attendees reviewed the findings and provided valuable input to the methodology being used, as well as the validation of results achieved by the consortium to develop new and bespoke C-ITS services, which will be piloted in eight major European cities and regions. The services will provide valuable transport information to road users, including:
• Parking availability;
• Blind-spot detection for cyclists;
• Roadworks warning;
• Traffic flow notifications.
