On May 23, ERTICO – ITS Europe organized a well-attended first consultation workshop on the interoperability of C-ITS Services. The workshop gathered expert representatives of 9 projects and platforms including C-Mobile, InterCor, NeMo, eMI3, AEOLIX, CONCORDA, SAFE STRIP, MaaS Alliance and MOBiNET.
The main goal of this first meeting was to identify the need for a cross-border service interoperability. Today, the first real ITS and C-ITS services are being deployed on a pan-European level. Many C-ITS projects define and implement services which run on huge amounts of data provided by all kind of sensors, built into vehicles, roadside infrastructure but also data produced by all kinds of other data sources. These services are mainly developed to serve only the local public such as services which are deployed in many cases as smartphone applications which access the backend data over proprietary interfaces. To really get the market of C-ITS services going, these interfaces must be specified more rigorously and where necessary standardized. Cross-border interoperability and pan European harmonization of application program interfaces is an absolute necessity to really start the C-ITS Services market. It must be possible to use a MaaS application in Helsinki, and without any changes, except some minor configuration settings use the same application in Bordeaux.
During this first workshop each of the participating projects presented their status and current results. Some projects are still on-going while others, such as MOBiNET, have been concluded. However, one the main results of these series of workshops should be to prevent inventing the wheel repeatedly. A close discussion between projects, even if they, in a first instance, don’t seem to be related at all, may reveal overlaps and common requirements otherwise left obscured. Some projects may even have found solutions which other projects are still struggling with. This will increase the efficiency of running European C-ITS projects, platforms and alliances. The idea behind the workshop is to use a bottom-up, technical approach in identifying overlaps in technology and data needs.
The workshops will gather not only engineers, but also decision makers and project managers. Common data needs are translated to existing standards and specifications. Where they exist, they are proposed as mandatory interfaces between service and back-end system, where they are missing necessary information, proposals are made to extend these existing standards. Finally, where standards and specifications do not exist, a proposal for a new standardisation is made.
The participants clearly flagged a need for a follow-up workshop which takes the current work one step further by identifying the concrete data needs of the different projects and platforms. A second consultation workshop on services interoperability is foreseen during the ITS World Congress in Copenhagen.
