Within the European Commission's CVIS project, work is going on to shrink the open vehicle communication platform to make it more market-ready and to remove barriers to the creation of appropriate applications by those external to the project. Here, Ertico's Zeljko Jeftic and Paul Kompfner and Q-Free's Knut Evensen discuss progress.
Development of the open communication platform which will support the various applications developed by the"The layered platform design supports many different applications using standard hardware and middleware," says Q-Free's Knut Evensen, CVIS Chief Architect and standardisation leader of the CALM (Communications Access for Land Mobiles) protocol architecture which aims to be the communications reference of cooperative systems in Europe. "Alongside the platform's development, work has gone on in CVIS to test and verify the 20-odd separate ISO standards which make up CALM. For the first time these are now available as an open stack ready for market. The CVIS test sites and 10 or so additional sites are deploying and will make use of the validated platform over the coming months.
"There are also plans for a lightweight version of the platform for deployment in, for example, field operational tests with up to a few thousand units." The development of the lightweight platform
CVIS mobility project
CVIS, which is coordinated by ERTICO, is the largest of the three main EC cooperative mobility projects. The other two are SAFESPOT and COOPERS (Co-operative Systems for Intelligent Road Safety).
CVIS has been tasked with developing use cases and technologies for cooperative vehicle-infrastructure systems and services. It is the world's first implementation of the CALM protocol architecture, which enables its router platform to communicate data in real time via multiple communication media. Equipped vehicles can use whichever communications media are in its immediate environment, providing both flexibility and some degree of redundancy. The CVIS communication platform is used within the project to enable trial applications such as vehicle-traffic system interaction, in-vehicle display of roadside signs, hazard detection and warnings and commercial vehicle services.
SAFESPOT uses Vehicular Ad Hoc NETworks (VANETs) for safety applications needing very low latency and reliable communications. The project aims to prevent road accidents by detecting potentially dangerous driving situations and providing early warnings to nearby vehicles. SAFESPOT has been responsible for developing a Safety Margin Assistant (SMA). This uses both vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communications to create and share safety messages.
COOPERS aims to reduce the development gap between the vehicle and infrastructure portions of cooperative road systems. It is exploring CALM-based continuous wireless data communication between vehicles and the roadside and will provide vehicles and drivers with location-based real-time safety-related information. In addition, COOPERS is exploring the use of vehicles as floating sensors to collect traffic and/or road condition data to enable cooperative traffic management, and to disseminate safety, traffic information and other messages to drivers using digital radio broadcast.
A number of core software and hardware components are exchanged and re-used between the three projects. reflects the maturation of the work within the project, passing from the creation of a means with which to prove the concepts behind CVIS to a proven technology which is fully functional and less unwieldy.
To show just how easy it is to work in the CVIS environment, the project team has created an "application innovation contest", the three most innovative of which will pick up awards at the World Congress in Stockholm. This has been open to both internal as well as non-CVIS partners, who have been provided with an application software developer's kit.
"As well as demonstrating CVIS's ease of use, we are also looking to get more people involved," says Jeftic. "I can see significant social networking potential - applications such as dynamic car-pooling and multimodal vehicle networking are just a couple of examples of developed applications which are external to the CVIS project." Evensen sees the contest as a demonstration of how ITS is combining discrete, vertical applications such as tolling and fleet management into more a cooperative, integrated approach.
"For the first time, we have systems and platforms which allow us to do that. We want to make the creation of new applications very easy, and the contest shows that very clearly. You'll see how developers outside the project have taken the CVIS development kit and had something new up and running in the space of just a few weeks."
Demonstrations at the 2009 ITS World Congress
The CVIS project has set up a major information dissemination effort for Stockholm, where it will be demonstrated at not less than four locations. All bring an additional piece to the puzzle creating the future world of cooperative systems, says ERTICO.
The Cooperative Systems demonstration area where CVIS together with its sister project SAFESPOT are the main demonstrators will feature a first-of-a-kind: three large screens which will allow viewers to see in real time what is actually going on inside the vehicles and systems on show. The screens will include renditions of the Local Dynamic Map application, driver's perspectives and other useful information. This moving 'bubble' of data surrounds an appropriately equipped vehicle and means that it and its occupants can be more fully aware of features and events in their immediate environment, even those which are out of sight (such as a stopped vehicle or other obstruction around a blind corner).
CVIS will be demonstrating cooperative traffic efficiency and SAFESPOT cooperative road safety. Together with the third cooperative project, COOPERS, they will demonstrate interoperability, while project experts will be available in a tented area close to the demonstration area to explain the technical details of CVIS, including mobile communications technologies, enhanced mapping and positioning, platform middleware and application engineering. Demonstration vehicles will also circulate on the public roads, to allow attendees to see CVIS applications in action in the real world. Compared with the 2008 ITS Congress in New York, visitors will experience a more 'up close and personal' view of CVIS applications and direct access to the technical experts. Attendees can also discuss the issues relating to deployment. CVIS will also put on a show in the Demonstration Theatre, with actors, a moderator and mock-ups to display future applications.
Finally, at the EC stand, visitors will be able to 'drive' a Volvo truck in a simulated cooperative mobility environment, and see CVIS and SAFESPOT applications from the driver's perspective.
The financial issue
The recent global economic crisis has hit the automotive sector especially hard. However, says Kompfner, recent events have also underlined the need for manufacturers to innovate, especially around the 'connected vehicle'. And, he adds, investment in transport infrastructure is holding up relatively well: "We're not 'there' yet in terms of cooperative infrastructure products but there's a growing appreciation among public and commercial road operators that the future is cooperative. The EC now has an ITS Action Plan with a strong emphasis on intelligent infrastructure, so the outlook is very positive even though both European and national level administrations still have yet to enunciate clear policies and deployment plans for cooperative systems." The US, according to Evensen, is reportedly at a similar stage."The feeling is that deployment is a lot closer," he continues. "The financial downturn has hit companies very hard but ITS is less affected by virtue of its public research funding component. That will also make ITS one of the first areas to benefit once recovery kicks in more strongly."
