The Data for Road Safety (DFRS) Platform is publishing eight self-declaration documents for its stakeholders that provide guidelines for sharing data on eight different safety-related traffic events. These events align with the data categories listed in EU Directive 886/2013, which defines procedures for providing users with road safety-related minimum universal traffic information. The first two forms, referring to short-term road works and unprotected accident area warning data, have recently been released.
The EU Delegated Regulation 886/2013 sets guidelines to ensure compatibility, interoperability and continuity of safety-related traffic information (SRTI) to detect road-safety events or conditions and communicate them to end-users. DFRS enhances road safety by optimizing the dissemination of safety-related traffic information, using data sourced from vehicles and infrastructure to its fullest extent. In the robust SRTI ecosystem created by DFRS, national road authorities, vehicle manufacturers and service providers cooperate to create safety warnings under the principle of reciprocity.
“Following the successful launch of our DFRS live map, we continue to see our private/public partnership continue to bear fruit. The self-declarations provide a common understanding for the provision of safety data amongst the OEMs, service providers and public authorities. Through this common understanding, each DFRS member will now have the confidence to proactively ingest data from the ecosystem to satisfy their respective safety use cases”, states Mohanad Ismail (WSP UK), Chair of the DFRS Technical Group.
The purpose of these self-declarations is to ensure accurate and quality data delivery of various potentially hazardous situations, written from the data-consumer point of view to provide end-users with up-to-date information while guaranteeing data protection. With these forms, DFRS contributes to the Regulation’s mission to prevent conflicting data from various sources.
“The self-declaration documents are the result of lengthy discussions and collaboration between participants from OEMs, public authorities, and service providers. We have leveraged knowledge and specifications from relevant industry consortiums such as the Car2Car Communication Consortium, TISA, C-Roads and DATEX II to find common ground and language of SRTI data”, says Markus Wieber (Ford).
Sharing data from road safety events
The European legislation contemplates eight different road incidents or conditions: temporary slippery road; animal, people, obstacles, and debris on the road; unprotected accident area; short-term road works; reduced visibility; wrong-way driver; unmanaged blockage of a road, and exceptional weather conditions. DFRS has published self-declaration forms related to two of these categories.
The EU defines ‘short-term road works‘ as any temporary road works carried out on the road or on the side of the road indicated only by minimum signing because of their short-term nature.
As the inaugural release, the DFRS team outlines a specific category of events falling under the umbrella of short-term road works:
The unprotected accident area is the second of these released documents, now available on the DFRS website. This category refers to those sections where an incident has occurred, and the authorities have not yet secured. These are the events that DFRS collects as ‘unprotected areas’:
DFRS collaborates closely with DATEX II to offer two distinct occurrence levels: Level A (certainty) and Level B (likelihood). Its focus is to guarantee precise time and location accuracy, ensuring outstanding quality.
Henrik Segesten (Volvo) reflects on the importance of the DFRS self-declarations: “For an OEM relying on DFRS data to warn customers about potential road hazards we need to ensure a high level of confidence in the accuracy of hazard detection, including precise location and timing. Fostering this confidence is fundamental to maintain trust in the system, ensuring that customers heed forthcoming warnings. Knowing that a participant of the DFRS ecosystem adheres to the self-declarations, gives OEMs the required confidence to make use of the available data and enables them to provide warnings to their customers which are relevant to them”.
