Kirk Steudle, national transportation advisor with Steudle Executive Group and former director of Michigan DOT, advocates for open architectures, data sharing and interoperability across ITS
In my last column, I noted my intention this year of discussing the keys to accelerating the adoption of advanced technologies and their applications. I’ve advocated here before for leveraging technology to make the largest measurable (and most cost-effective) gains for optimizing transportation efficiencies. However, as infrastructure owners and operators (IOOs), we are bound by the availability of technologies and the vendors that offer them. How do we better navigate the technology landscape to accelerate deployment of the technologies that have the greatest impact for IOOs and their roadway networks? The key will be technology interoperability that ensures extensibility at the systems level.
I have previously discussed the importance of IOOs fostering nontraditional partnerships as part of their processes and planning for current and future transportation and mobility challenges and growth. Last December, I also mentioned the larger regional successes that can be attained through inter-agency cooperation. These partnerships and working relationships form the foundation for better identifying, understanding, and evaluating the technologies and applications available that address specific current and future transportation needs and challenges.
This brings me to interoperability. Here I continue to call upon vendors and manufacturers to ensure cross-vendor integration, especially where software and data sharing are involved. We must take the lessons learned in the early 2000s and avoid the pitfalls of proprietary solutions that are incapable of working and communicating with other systems.
“We must insist on and look to technologies and systems that support open-source architectures”
In the early days of ITS technology, the focus was almost exclusively on end-user functionality, with a granular focus on solving a particular problem. Little consideration was given to the larger picture of other or future systems. Because of this, ITS solutions and their software didn’t offer the extensibility or cross-vendor integration needed for the adoption of emerging technologies. While these solutions yielded immediate capabilities, they were found to hamper users with proprietary data interfaces that did not allow for interoperability with newer systems. As IOOs, we must insist on and look to technologies and systems that support open-source architectures to help accelerate the deployment and extensibility of new ITS solutions and applications. These systems are designed to leverage standardized data interfaces and interoperability to help ensure solutions are future proof.
Recent deployments of new connected solutions on our roadways have shed a bright light on the importance of technology inclusion and interoperability at a systems level. Broader sets of new use cases and applications – many of which are covered in this edition, including weigh-in motion and vulnerable roadway user safety – are already in use. What is promising is that these applications are demonstrating the results of their interoperability within existing infrastructure to aggregate and share data. Until next time, travel safe.
This article first appeared in the May 2025 edition of TTi magazine
