Cooperative vehicle highway systems – news from the ITS World Congress in Stockholm, September 2009

Date: 9/12/2009

Source: HA CVIS project

The 2009 ITS World Congress included many presentations on cooperative vehicle technologies.  These technologies can be used to improve road safety, traveller information and network management.  Highlights from some of the sessions which were of particular relevance to the Highways Agency have been provided by the Highways Agency’s members of the CVIS (Cooperative Vehicle Infrastructure Systems) project team.

A Special Interest Session on Cooperative Vehicle Highway Systems (CVHS) included:

• The World Road Association (PIARC) and the International Society of Automobile Engineers Joint Task Force.  This aims to inform road operators and national road authorities about developments in Cooperative Vehicle Highway Systems (CVHS) in the UK and IntelliDrive in the USA, and to help accelerate deployment by recommending good practice.  A report is being prepared which will cover recent developments around the world, deployment issues, roles and responsibilities, common interfaces and open standards and legal and regulatory issues.
• Driver Safety Support Systems (DSSS) in Japan.  This includes collision prevention, stop sign warning, signal recognition, warnings for rear end collisions and queues.  A large scale trial is under way, involving over 1,000 vehicles.
• Advanced Safety Vehicle (ASV) in Japan.  This project began in 1991 and has now reached the stage where the benefits of driver assistance systems are being promoted in a ‘popularisation’ programme using driving simulators and guidebooks, to improve take-up, currently focusing on collision avoidance in Heavy Goods Vehicles.  A demonstration took place early in 2009 (see ITS Radar International article, May 2009).
• The discussion focused on the role of road authorities and what will happen if they do nothing.  It was suggested that systems based on vehicle-to-vehicle communication will develop anyway, and cars would become more autonomous (and costly) with benefits to individual users, but that this would not provide benefits to society as a whole; the return on investment would be greater if investment in infrastructure enabled vehicle-to-infrastructure communications systems to be deployed.

An Executive Session: ‘Towards a Common Approach to Cooperative Systems’ included:

• A speaker from Japan who stated that it is expected that vehicle-to-vehicle communications will be widespread in Japan within the next five years if the Advanced Safety Vehicle ‘popularisation’ programme and accompanying incentives are successful.
• A speaker from the US discussed the ‘IntelliDrive’ programme.  The applications which are being considered for early adoption are the ones based on cellular radio and Dedicated Short Range Communications (DSRC); deployment of infrastructure-based applications does not appear to be likely in the near future as these are in the early stages of development.

A Special Interest Session; ‘Towards safer, cleaner and smarter mobility with cooperative systems’ included:

• Presentations on some of the European Projects in this area (for more details of these projects see the ITS Radar International CVHS Fact Sheet).
• A presentation on deployment scenarios for cooperative systems. The benefits of cooperative systems were seen for users (safety, information, lower costs), network operators (more efficiency), society (fewer accidents and lower emissions), and industry (new markets).  To realise the full benefits it was suggested that a practical system would require a beacon along every 2km of motorway, which amounts to 50,000 beacons across Europe; currently there is no obvious business case for this level of investment.  The following path to deployment was envisaged:
  • Enhanced common applications (such as alerts, driver assistance and real time traffic and event information), with key feature being multi-channel communications with seamless handover on the move and roaming
  • Infrastructure beacons broadcasting local information to vehicles (I2V) – e.g. mimicking road signs and providing other data such as temporary speed limits
  • Using vehicle to infrastructure communications (V2I), road operators can obtain anonymous data - such as journey time - to assist with traffic management (e.g. early detection of incidents and congestion) and provide information to vehicles (I2V)
  • Value Added Services transmitted to vehicles via beacons (I2V) (e.g. local data and traffic data).

Copies of the presentations at the Special Interest Sessions and Executive Sessions are available to congress delegates. HA staff should contact: ben.catchesides@highways.gsi.gov.uk.  For more information on papers at the ITS World Congress which are of relevance to the HA, see the ITS Radar International index of papers on the ITS Radar International web site.

Highways Agency contact for more information on the CVIS project: graham.seaton@highways.gsi.gov.uk.

Keywords: Communications, Cooperative vehicle systems, Environment, Safety, Traffic information, Traffic management