New Traffic Management Data Exchange Standard published by ISO

Sources: ISO TC 204, ITS Standardisation Activities in Japan

A new international standard has been published on the exchange of traffic management data, between road-side modules and the traffic management centre.

ISO 15784:2008, “Data Exchange Involving Road-side Modules Communication”, was published on 6th October 2008. It complements existing DATa EXchange (DATEX) standards, and relates to the data exchange between the traffic management centre and road-side modules, as well as between road-side modules, as shown below.

The scope does not include the communication between road-side modules and on-board units, in-vehicle communication, in-cabinet communication or motion video transmission from a camera or recorded media.

The new standard provides principles and documentation rules of application profiles used in the exchange of data. An application profile is a set of meta-data elements, policies, and guidelines defined for a particular application.

The application profile designates a set of base standards regarding the three upper layers of OSI (Open Systems Interconnection) model to meet the requirements of communication between a centre and roadside modules and prescribes how to use the base standards.

The standard sits in Working Group 9 of ISO TC 204, “Integrated Transport Information, Management and Control”, and comprises the following parts:

o        Part 1: General principles and documentation framework of application profiles

o        Part 3: Application profile-data exchange (AP-DATEX)

Part 2 of the standard, “Application profile - transportation management protocols (AP - TMP)”, timed-out and was withdrawn during the development process, because standardisation work in America was delayed.

The ISO 14827 “DATEX” standard, for data exchange between traffic management centres, was published in 2005 and is now under review. Part 1 contains the “message definition requirements” (what is contained in the messages) and part 2, “DATEX-ASN”, contains the communication protocol. DATEX was originally developed in Europe, and DATEX-ASN is the American version, using the ASN.1 language.

The European version of DATEX was called “DATEX-NET”, and this along with a series of DATEX standards, published in 2000, has now been withdrawn. An updated European version, “DATEX II - Data Exchange Specifications for Traffic Management and Information”, is currently under development in Working Group 8, Road Databases, of CEN TC 278. The draft DATEX II standard contains three parts:

o        Part 1: Context and framework

o        Part 2: Location referencing

o        Part 3: Situation publication

For further information see the ITS Radar International DATEX II Factsheet (Jan 07) and www.datex2.eu.

ITS Radar International will continue to monitor developments

Keywords: Geographic information, Standard, Traffic centre, Traffic information, Traffic management