In 2013, ERTICO set up an innovation platform to, amongst other things, develop a common specification for map data update exchange. That platform, TN-ITS, has been evolving ever since: between 2018 and the end of 2021, TN-ITS GO took on the mission to carefully plan, implement, and make operational the new ITS spatial data supply chain strategies of fourteen Member States right from the source all the way to the data consumer. September 2021 sees the platform begin its next phase with the start of a third project, NAPCORE. But how are the projects, and their results, related to each other? And what benefits do they bring? Let’s start from the beginning.
The TN-ITS association, acting as an innovation platform under the legal umbrella of ERTICO, gathers all stakeholders to further develop the TN-ITS data sharing mechanism between (mainly public) pan European road authorities and service providers.
This data sharing mechanism is based upon the technical specification CEN TS 17268 and already deployed via the CEF TN-ITS GO project in 14 Member States.
One of the big benefits of TN-ITS data feed is the ‘trust’ that applicants can have in the provided data, as they are sourced directly from the public authority, who acts as a trust provider (see ref. here). The data enables the realisation of the ‘digital twin’, building and maintaining a virtual representation of the physical roads and their attributes, such as traffic signs (e.g. speed limits, etc.…). As such TN-ITS forms the basis for future regulatory data governing full automation.
In many cases, those data allow map and service providers to provide fresh, regularly updated, accurate, and trusted digital maps. These maps are, for example, deployed by OEMs and published in the in-car GPS and navigation devices as a ‘base layer’, able to accept publications of all additional map-related services, such as traffic management information.
(Want to know more? Join us in our upcoming webinar: “An introduction to maps: from creation to innovation”, which will take place 22 September 2021!)
Currently, the TN-ITS GO project also addresses the long-term deployment activity requirements to ensure TN-ITS market uptake, including regions and cities. This new activity identifies the more stringent data chain requirements that need to be taken into account, such as maintaining trust, authenticity, data channel integrity, creating recognition and visibility, to ensure differentiation between applications using the TN-ITS authoritative data source and any other private initiative.
This action is a necessary preparation for TN-ITS as a regulatory data source to enable future (CAD) automation applications. The task will use Intelligent Speed Assistance (ISA) as a leading application and conduct a case study on how regulatory data can enhance ISA through supported implementation of digital maps (see more here).
The results of the study will also serve as an excellent preparation for fitting TN-ITS into the federated National Access Points (NAP) infrastructure, subject of the CEF project NAPCORE.
