Overview
Being a part of Intelligent Transport Systems, cooperative ITS (C-ITS or cooperative systems) encompass a group of technologies and applications that allow effective data exchange through wireless communication technologies between components and actors of the transport system, very often between vehicles (vehicle-to-vehicle or V2V) or between vehicles and infrastructure (vehicle-to-infrastructure or V2I).
The deployment of C-ITS is an evolutionary process that will start with the less complex use cases. These are referred to as “Day-1-services”, encompassing messages about traffic jams, hazardous locations, road-works and slow or stationary vehicles, as well as weather information and speed advises to harmonise traffic. Using probe vehicle and infrastructure-related data, all C-ITS services shall be transmitted directly into the vehicles in a way that allows users to get informed but not distracted.
The deployment of C-ITS faces many important issues still unresolved, such as legal, organisational, administrative, governing aspects, technical and standardisation issues as well as implementation and procurement issues.
C-Roads is a platform of Member States working on the deployment of harmonised and interoperable C-ITS services in Europe.
The C-Roads Platform will pursue cooperation among Member States for issues related to the deployment of C-ITS, such as sharing experiences and knowledge or user acceptance. It will follow a bottom-up approach that will include national pilots. These will form basic elements for a later pan-European C-ITS implementation. The national pilot initiatives will move on to cross-site testing which will allow them to grow together and achieve transnational interoperability. In this way C-Roads will ensure European cohesion of C-ITS deployment in the European Union with regards to a long-term roll-out.
C-Roads Germany will develop and experiment innovative road C-ITS solutions located at two pilot sites. The Hessian pilot will introduce four new C-ITS services and will extend two already existing services accompanied by the necessary infrastructure deployment on the Hessian motorway network. The Lower Saxony pilot will deploy three new C-ITS services on the North Sea-Baltic and Orient/East-Med corridor (motorway A2).
C-Roads Germany is expected to have a substantial impact on the network safety and efficiency resulting in increased awareness of the government and industry decision makers of the benefits of C-ITS. Sub-activity 2.3 will aim at monitoring and assessing this impact. This will likely lead to increased deployment of C-ITS throughout the national networks, resulting better minimum service coverage of the total European transport network, including urban and rural roads. Hence, the impact of the corridor actions is expected to have a major snowball effect on the network scale.