On 27 June, the TN-ITS ERTICO Innovation Platform held its GA followed by a networking cocktail event celebrating 5 years of its work.

The TN-ITS Platform brings fresher map data to intelligent transport services, and aims to facilitate and foster the exchange of ITS-related spatial road data between road authorities as trusted data providers and data users as map makers and other parties (OEMs for example). This exchange of information on changes in static road attributes (such as planned road works, traffic lights and speed limits) are of great importance for the development of automated driving applications. When Public Authorities and Road Operators change an attribute in a map, and this is not communicated to map makers, then the information may reach the user too late- when already faced with the road works obstacle or when the user is already speeding or accessing a location when access has been planned to be restricted.

More to that, it is important that digital maps are highly up to date for attributes that are critical in terms of safety and efficiency. The map providers cannot easily keep their maps up to date for such attributes from a trusted data source, while up-to-date maps are a key asset for ITS applications. The solution is to retrieve the information on changes from the road authorities. As they create the changes, they are the most trusted, efficient and immediate source for such information.

This requires digital storage and maintenance on the side of road authorities, and some kind of flagging of changes. With governments more and more going digital, systems for such digital storage and maintenance are increasingly available, however, with a multitude of solutions that are different in terms of GIS and data models applied. Therefore, a common exchange format is needed, enabling creation of plugins to existing (legacy) systems for extraction of information on changes in road attributes, and this is what the TN-ITS Platform is working on.

The TN-ITS Platform has been supporting the implementation of this standard methodology for updating static information related to maps since 2013.