With close to 4,000 registered participants, 494 representatives from the press and more than 15,000 exhibition visitors from 65 countries, the Tokyo World Congress was generally acclaimed to be a big success.
With a European presence that was the second largest after Japan, the ERTICO Partnership took an active role at the World Congress. The ERTICO Congress team took care of the European part of the programme and Eropean key experts moderated 4 executive session, 10 professionals from ERTICO moderated 17 technical sessions and in some cases organized, moderated and / or spoke at 11 special interest sessions and ERTICO organised 2 ancillary events. 28 Partners were joined the European Pavilion showing the latest developments of ITS in Europe (include picture).
The congress promoted greater participation in international dialogue to share transport policies, experiences and expertise among academia, experts and policymakers from various part of the world. This mutual cooperation to solve the transport problems in various countries and areas is also the red thread that runs through the sessions organised by the ERTICO Partnership at the Tokyo Congress. This article takes a closer look at some of them.
Compass4D
The deployment of Cooperative Intelligent Transport Systems (C-ITS) has been one of the topics widely discussed at the Congress. Hence the presentation of the Compass4D project along other well known deployment projects in the world, in particular ITS Spot (Japan) and Safety Pilot (USA). Two Special Interest Sessions focussed on C-ITS deployment and involved Compass4D directly:
– SIS 11, “Driven by Cities: deployment of cooperative mobility services in urban environment”.
The session focussed on the deployment of C-ITS in cities and urban areas, showing how public authorities drive major changes as leaders of ITS implementation. Concrete results from deployment initiatives around the world were shown and shared.
Peter Sweatman (University of Michigan, USA) presented Safety Pilot, Koichi Sakai (Japanese MLIT) illustrated the ITS Spot services. Compass4D was presented from the point of view of public authorities (Louahdi Khoudour, French Ministry for Transport), the service providers (Siebe Turksma, Imtech Traffic&Infra), and the automotive industry (Hossein Zakizadeh, Volvo Group). The perspective of Mobile Network Operators and their key role in C-ITS were finally presented by Samuel Loyson (Orange).
SIS 22, “Cooperative Mobility Workshop”
This session, organised as an interactive workshop focussed on the C-ITS deployment process showing good examples from which other regions can learn and get inspiration.
Compass4D was therefore illustrated as a lighthouse project in Europe, leading the deployment of C-ITS services in 7 European cities. Concrete benefits, scaling up strategies and stakeholders value chain were openly presented and discussed among the participants.
In Tokyo, Compass4D was also presented at the “AASHTO Annual meeting and openly illustrated at the “9th Workshop on Vehicle Communications for Safety and Sustainability”.
For more information http://www.compass4d.eu/
ECOSTAND Final event
The final ECOSTAND event project explained the main ECOSTAND achievements and clarified the results from the international cooperation between Japan, US and the EU. The main purpose of the event was the dissemination of the joint technical report with a special focus on the expected stakeholders groups and its respective use.
Approximately 20 participants represented various stakeholders such as policy makers who want to reduce CO2 by means of ITS or system producers who are interested in the potential impact of the systems they produce. Also the research community was represented to discuss follow-up research activities that could support the further development of the joint assessment methodology.
The lively discussions focused on the identification of the potential next steps that could be taken to:
– Complete the methodology for further usage (e.g. include electric vehicles)
– To validate the methodology (i.e. is it complete and can it be used?)
– To set up of an international data repository and
– To further work on application of the methodology through some form of standardization
In a second, follow-up meeting in Tokyo, the alignment between the new METI-project, the American AERIS programme and the European Amitran & ICT-Emissions activities has been discussed. The objective was to identify next steps for further collaboration. The discussion mainly focused on the application of the methodology to a number of case studies and the exchange of the results. Last but not least the EU-US Working Group discussed a more detailed planning between the 2 continents on Sustainability Applications to realize a real-life sustainability application during the ITS World Conference in Bordeaux in 2015.
For more information http://www.ecostand-project.eu/
79 GHz
The 79 GHz consortium organised a workshop in Tokyo. The support action 79 GHz aims at establishing an international platform to define, organise, coordinate and manage the worldwide activities of all the automotive radar stakeholders.
Due to the bad weather conditions in Tokyo, a planned special interest sessions (SIS16 – Automotive Rader on the Move Towards International Frequency) dedicated to the 79 GHz project was cancelled. However, the workshop organizers decided to add two speakers of the cancelled SIS16 session (from the companies Honda and Renault) to the agenda workshop.
Mr Wolfgang Hoefs representing the European Commission, opened the workshop and underlined the importance of the harmonization of the radio spectrum. He emphasized the role of 79 GHz radar in the field of ITS applications to detect better the vehicle’s environment facilitating more automated functions in the future. (insert picture)
Project members presented an overview of the latest achievements and of the work that has been carried out over the past years at a global level and in specific countries. The project aims to achieve worldwide the same regulation as already adopted by the European Commission in Decision 2004/545/EC – meaning the same emission power specification and frequency parameters. The automotive OEMs (original equipment manufacturer) gave their vision on the use of 79 GHz sensors: the lack of harmonization impedes reduction of production costs while the harmonization of the regulation reduces the verification and validation time as well as the development time. They emphasized the need of high resolution and accuracy which can be delivered by the proposed 79 GHz wide band solution.
From 2014 onwards EuroNCAP’s (European New Car Assessment Program) 5 star level will require the deployment of ADAS systems in the vehicles. This is mainly the result of the new requirements relating to the recognition of vulnerable road users. 79 GHz seems to be the best solution considering its costs and the provided technology will enable mass market penetration in the near future.
To conclude the workshop, the speakers and the audience agreed that new internationally harmonized radar technology will be important to make global deployment of intelligent transportation happen and ADAS is an important element of the future of safe and sustainable transportation.
For more information http://www.79ghz.eu/
FOT-Net 6th International Workshop
The theme of the FOT-Net Workshop was ‘Impact and deployment of Field Operational Test (FOT) results and data’. General objectives of this workshop included reinforcing the global FOT network in order to exchange knowledge and best practices, fostering cooperation for FOT activities as well as supporting the coherent development and implementation of FOTs at European and international level.
Experts from different regions discussed four topics: Data and Impact analysis, Strategies for deployment and satisfying stakeholders’ needs, Sharing of driver data from FOTs and Naturalistic Driving Studies, and the Sharing of cooperative systems data. Representatives from Europe, North-America, and Asia-Pacific reported on the developments in their region.
Data analysis focussed on the methodological and practical issues surrounding the data and impact analysis of systems in FOTs. This session addressed methods and tools for analysis as well as how to set up the data and impact analysis before the real-world test takes place, so that the right data are measured. The section Strategies for deployment and satisfying stakeholders’ needs concluded that it is important that road operators start to make their information. If you want to go to deployment the message is: keep it simple, start pragmatic, just a few services at a time. The session Sharing of driver data from FOTs and Naturalistic Driving Studies focussed on facilitating global common research taking into account both the views of the data providers and the data researchers. It also addressed questions on sharing driver data on a global level, requirements on the organisations for storing/analyzing data and stakeholders’ contributions. Participants also discussed how and by whom driver data will be collected in the future and how that will affect the data sharing. Sharing of cooperative systems data focused on data used in cooperative systems (CS), discussing international cooperation and cooperative system data as a candidate for the “killer application” in CS. The session also covered the tools for dealing with the huge amount of this data and the questions who will benefit from sharing this data and who will own this data.
One of the conclusions of the day was the strong focus on deployment. Some systems and services are already deployed, for others the road is still long and paved with many technical, organisational and business obstacles. But the need to improve safety and services also creates opportunities. The international workshop contributed to countries and regions learning from each other and the formation of new partnerships.
More information, presentations and report please visit the FOT-Net website
Special session Analysing the outcomes of Field Operational Tests (FOT)
FOT-Net organised a special session on Analysing the outcomes of Field Operational Tests (FOT). Adrian Zlocki (IKA) presented experience and lessons learned on data analysis for large scale FOTs. Recommendations were given on practical issues such as the need for synchronisation of data, but also on the need for more automated and advanced tools and techniques, such as for analysing video-data. The presentation from Martijn de Kievit and Eline Jonkers (TNO) focussed on best practices in determining large scale impacts in a FOT. Techniques and methods for impact assessment and scaling up were explained. Impact Assessment delivers the main results of a FOT but is not an easy step, and time pressure is high at the end of a project. Issues addressed included the measurement of explanatory variables and how realistic the scaling up of results is.
Helena Gellerman (SAFER) presented a framework to enhance global cooperative research on FOT/NDS data. According to Helena Gellerman, the main challenges are the different consortium agreements and consent forms, intellectual property rights and legal settings, the need for good data documentation, and the effort and finances needed to create and maintain a data-sharing platform which is attractive for data providers. Finally Dave Leblanc (UMTRI) provided a US perspective, describing his experiences from UMTRI and the Safety Pilot. He provided examples of re-use of data for answering other research questions than the ones for which the data were originally collected. Some recommendations for overcoming data sharing challenges included avoiding participants’ agreements being too restrictive, support from the data host and cleansing data containing propriety information.
Launch of the 10th ITS European Congress in Helsinki, Finland, 16-19 June 2014
During the Tokyo Congress , on 15 October, at the European Pavillion reception, Minna Kivimäki, Director General of the Transport Ministry of Finland, officially launched “ITS in your pocket”, the contest for the best app for smartphones. The app contest 2014 is open to European companies, team, and individual developers who want to learn about intelligent transport systems and develop their ideas and proposals with the guidance of the best experts in the field. The winners of the competition will be awarded at the ITS European Congress in Helsinki next June and granted prizes for their best three mobile applications in the following categories :
- multimodality (boost the use of multimodal transport)
- sustainability (sustainable urban mobility)
- innovation (“out of the box” innovations for better mobility).
On the same occasion, also the Call for Papers for the Helsinki Congress was officially opened. In additional to Technical and Scientific Papers, the 2014 Call is open for the first time to “Commercial papers” presenting products or ideas close to market use
During the reception, attendees were invited to taste Bordeaux wine in the presence of the Deputy Mayor of Bordeaux, Mrs Nathalie Delattre. This wine tasting was a symbolic introduction to the venue of the 2015 ITS World Congress in Europe.
For more information please visit the Congress website
