US Ten-Year ITS Program Plan Addresses Advanced Intelligent Vehicle-Highway Systems
IVsource.net
7 December 2001

USDOT and ITS America have spent all year developing the Plan -- the first substantial effort of this type since the mid-Nineties.  Notably, for those interested in exploring safety & efficiency aspects of vehicle-highway cooperation, the Program Plan contains some truly significant developments.

Beginning early in 2001, the US Department of Transportation and ITS America have invested substantial time and energy in creating an “ITS Ten Year Program Plan and Research Agenda.”  The plan is seen as crucial in helping USDOT define its position towards Congressional re-authorization activity, which will result in legislation that lays out the Department’s ITS activities for, roughly, the period 2004-2008.

For its part, ITS America brought together key stakeholders from across the US to provide input and deliberation on the Plan.  The near-final version was ready in September, and then augmented with new text regarding the ITS role in  homeland security.  The draft final version has been presented to the ITS America Board of Directors and is expected to be transmitted to Transportation Secretary Norm Mineta shortly.  The latest version can be downloaded from the ITS America website at  www.itsa.org/research.html.

Significant developments can be seen in the Program Plan that should be of interest to those exploring the impacts of vehicle-highway cooperation on safety and traffic efficiency.  The Plan takes a fairly strong position in this area, and it is a real success for vehicle-highway automation advocates to see transportation automation so thoroughly included in the transportation management section.  In fact, some experts see this as a turning point for the US ITS community and for USDOT, which appears to be “coming back” to explore the potential of automated systems, after having ignored this area since the demise of the National Automated Highway System Consortium in 1998.

Major highlights of the Plan are as follows:

• Vehicle-highway cooperative systems for safety are included in Programmatic Theme P-2,  “Advanced Crash Avoidance Technologies,” and the ability of  infrastructure sensing to augment vehicle systems is recognized.

• Vehicle-highway cooperative systems for traffic efficiency are included in Programmatic Theme P-4, “Advanced Transportation Management.”   One of two subcategories is  "Advanced Transportation Automation Systems" in which the infrastructure and vehicles communicate and interact "to optimize traffic flow."  The Plan notes, and seeks to build on, the  Cooperative Vehicle Highway Automation Systems (CVHAS) program currently involving 11 states.

• Standards are noted as a critical factor for successful deployment of these systems.  Vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-roadside communications, as well as standards for onboard placement of equipment and driver message sets, are called out in particular.

• Floating car data collection figures strongly as a future data source.

• The plan calls for starting a new series of Field Operational Tests to explore infrastructure cooperation, vehicle-to-vehicle communications, and other technology advancements.

Below are excerpts from the Plan itself, which are relevant to vehicle-highway cooperation for safety and traffic efficiency (look for items in bold print that pertain to Intelligent Vehicle issues):

TEN-YEAR NATIONAL PROGRAM PLAN AND RESEARCH AGENDA FOR INTELLIGENT TRANSPORTATION SYSTEMS IN THE UNITED STATES

Prepared by:

The Intelligent Transportation Society of America
in cooperation with
The United States Department of Transportation

F I N A L   D R A F T

Goals

This plan identifies four benefit areas and associated goals against which change and progress can be measured.  These goals provide the guideposts for fully realizing the opportunities that ITS technology systems can provide in enhancing the operation of the nation’s transportation systems, in improving the quality of life for all citizens, and in increasing user satisfaction, whether for business or personal travel.

1. Safety – ITS presents the opportunity to save thousands of lives, millions of injuries, and billions of dollars in property and productivity losses through improvements such as these:

• Preventing crashes in large numbers through technology that improves the performance of drivers, vehicles, and the infrastructure

• Mitigating the consequences of crashes that do occur through improved, sensor-based injury-reducing technology in vehicles and by enabling surer and swifter responses by emergency services

• Identifying and influencing the behavior of high-risk commercial drivers; identifying high-risk carriers and working with them to improve their safety management processes

• Encouraging safe and responsible behavior through automated enforcement.

• Enabling communication and cooperation between vehicles and the infrastructure, among other things to enable vehicle performance to adapt to changing traffic patterns, weather conditions, and topographic features

• Connecting vehicles, vehicle operators, travelers, public safety agencies, and the infrastructure through an integrated network of transportation and environmental information, and applying information to enhance safety management by both the public and private sectors

• Helping to keep transportation safe from terrorist attacks.

An effective safety program of pre-competitive cooperative research and deployment leadership will help to put American industry at the forefront of these lifesaving technologies, assuring that domestic requirements are thoroughly met and bringing the benefits of these technologies promptly to the American people.

The goal is to reduce annual transportation-related fatalities by 15% overall by 2011, saving 57,000 lives per year.

2. Efficiency/Economy – ITS provides the means to save large amounts of time and money by more effectively and economically moving people and goods throughout the transportation system.  Beyond reducing the delays and the property and healthcare costs related to crashes, ITS will provide infrastructure management tools and information for both operators and users of the transportation system, that will enhance efficiency and economy by making improvements such as these:

• Delivering faster, more accurate and comprehensive travel information via more media to more users to enable decision making on whether to make a trip, when to start, and what modes of transportation to use

• Providing information management tools to better manage the infrastructure, increasing its effective capacity and throughput

• Providing information management tools to facilitate the effective use of new construction techniques and materials, and to monitor the condition of guideways, bridges, stations, terminals, tunnels, and pedestrian crosswalks to economically guide maintenance and repair of the infrastructure, prolong its life, and moderate the need for its expansion and replacement

• Tracking and providing more transparent interchange of information about shipments, containers, trucks, trains, and freight cars through checkpoints, and at and between terminals, shipping points, and arrival points, thereby enabling more reliable and timely freight movement and management

• Reducing administrative and regulatory costs for public agencies and commercial vehicle operators

• Promoting automated infrastructure-vehicle cooperation to optimize both individual trips and overall system throughput.

The goal is to save at least $20 billion per year by enhancing throughput and capacity through better information, better system management, and the containment of congestion by providing for the efficient end-to-end movement of people and goods, including quick, seamless intermodal transitions.

...

Programmatic Themes (Overview)

P-2 – Advanced Crash Avoidance Technologies

ITS can help to eliminate a large number of crashes.  Unprecedented levels of safety, mobility, and efficiency will be made possible through the development, integration, and deployment of a new generation of in-vehicle electronics, vehicle automation, and selective automated enforcement, including the determination of fitness to drive.

In-Vehicle Electronics and Vehicle-Infrastructure Cooperation:  Four kinds of in-vehicle electronics products are of interest: information products, diagnostic/prognostic products, driver assistance products, and active safety products.  All help drivers and vehicles to perform better and more safely, and with a connection to an enhanced infrastructure, their full potential can be better realized.

P-4 – Advanced Transportation Management

Advanced transportation management intelligently and adaptively manages the flow of vehicles (automobiles, public transit vehicles, and trains) through the physical infrastructure, often across multiple jurisdictions and modes.

Advanced transportation management systems enable area-wide surveillance and detection, rapid acquisition of traffic flow data, real-time evaluation of traffic flows, predictive capabilities regarding near-term, real-time operational responses to traffic flow changes, and evaluation of the operational responses to traffic flow changes.

Advanced Transportation Automation Systems:  Research is already in progress on Cooperative Vehicle-Highway Automation Systems (CVHAS) that help to automate all or part of the driving task for private cars, public transportation vehicles, commercial vehicles, and maintenance vehicles through an intelligent infrastructure.  In this context, the infrastructure may include instrumented roadways or dedicated lanes, or the logical infostructure created by a public or private information provider.  The primary objective is to increase the capacity and flow of existing infrastructure.  Research in infrastructure–vehicle transportation automation will include the exploration of automated public transportation systems including precision docking of public transportation vehicles, dedicated lanes for automated trucks, automatic guidance of snow removal and other maintenance vehicles, and potentially in the future, fully automated passenger vehicles.

Programmatic Theme #2 - Advanced Crash Avoidance Technologies

Current Status and Opportunities

Transportation-related safety is clearly more than safe driving.  Constant, ongoing attention is needed to improve safety for pedestrians, cyclists, train and transit system riders, and the operators and occupants of all kinds of vehicles from farm equipment to high-speed trains.  However, the sheer number of fatalities and injuries related to road travel makes a strong argument for a coordinated national initiative to make driving safer.

Significant progress has already been made in reducing the number of deaths and injuries on the nation’s highways.  More than a quarter of a million lives and over $700 billion have been saved over the last four decades through vehicle safety improvements and fundamental changes in driver behavior.  However, despite this progress, more than 40,000 Americans die in six million crashes each year.  Driver error remains the leading cause of crashes, cited in more than 90% of police crash reports.  ITS can shift the paradigm from helping occupants to survive a crash to helping the driver avoid the crash in the first place.  In-vehicle and infrastructure cooperative systems can help drivers avoid hazardous mistakes by minimizing distraction, helping in degraded driving conditions, and providing warnings or control in imminent crash situations.  ITS can also encourage better driver behavior through automated enforcement of  driver licensing and traffic laws.

Making driving safer will require a high level of productive cooperation between all sectors of the economy:

• Vehicle manufacturers and their suppliers are actively at work developing in-vehicle products to make the vehicle safer, with electronic devices whose reflexes are quicker than people’s and which can compensate for at least some driver error.  Map database vendors are working on the digital maps that are needed, in the short and medium term, to enhance the performance of safety and convenience devices like adaptive cruise control, self-aiming headlights, curve warnings, vision enhancement, and road/lane departure warnings; and in the long term for collision and road/lane departure prevention.

• Infrastructure managers and their suppliers are actively engaged in providing better traffic control and information devices and in creating better networks to link these devices to traffic control centers and to link control, operations, and response centers to one another.  (See Programmatic Theme #4, “Advanced Transportation Management,” for additional discussion.)

• The federal government, in cooperation with public- and private-sector organizations, is sponsoring research to better understand driver behavior, ensure the safety of in-vehicle information systems, and improve the effectiveness of advanced crash avoidance technologies.

There are a variety of potentially fruitful avenues to pursue safer travel through advanced technology for which additional research is needed.

USDOT is focusing attention and resources on evaluating the effectiveness and operability of advanced crash avoidance technologies for passenger cars, commercial vehicles, transit vehicles, and specialty vehicles through the Intelligent Vehicle Initiative (IVI).  Field operational tests are being conducted on numerous technologies:

• Forward collision avoidance and adaptive cruise control

• Rollover stability warning and control

• Obstacle detection, and infrastructure-assisted hazard warning

• Use of radio-navigation, including differential GPS, to help precisely locate vehicles

• Lane departure warning

• Alternative mechanisms to deliver warnings to drivers including head-up displays, and warnings that are heard or felt as well as seen

• Electronic braking systems

In addition, various standards-making organizations like the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) and the International Standards Organization (ISO) are currently undertaking or planning to develop operational standards or guidelines for the use of such advanced vehicle control and safety systems.  In a few cases, standards development is moving ahead before the widespread introduction of these systems to the market, but this is not true in all cases.  Due to the proprietary nature of product development, and wariness of producers toward regulation, it is sometimes difficult to achieve timely consensus on standards for these advanced systems.  Additional areas where further gains can be made include understanding consumer acceptance for automated or partial-control systems, system usability, integration of multiple interfaces and systems, alternative modality warnings, privacy concerns, and infrastructure oversight and maintenance for cooperative systems.

This plan contends that the magnitude of the potential public good – the saving of thousands of lives, millions of injuries, billions of dollars each year through safer road travel – recommends concerted national action and cooperation.  Great care and selectivity must be exercised in identifying areas for cooperation, especially among private sector competitors.  Competition fuels too many advances in productivity and quality to be lightly trifled with.  However, the careful identification of technologies and approaches that can be placed in the precompetitive arena can go a long way to realizing the safety benefits that are invariably at the top of the list of ITS priorities.

In addition, this plan contends that once technology for enhancing safety is reliably available, the public sector has a strong fiscal and moral obligation to take the lead in adopting this technology and in creating incentives for its adoption by others.

In recent years, motor vehicle crashes have resulted in more than 40,000 fatalities and over 3 million injuries each year.  ITS can help to eliminate a large fraction of these crashes through several techniques:

• The development, integration, and deployment of a new generation of in-vehicle electronics

• Better vehicle-infrastructure cooperation

• Mechanisms that can determine fitness to drive

• Selective automated enforcement

In-Vehicle Electronics and Vehicle-Infrastructure Cooperation

Individual in-vehicle products are already coming to market, but realizing the full benefit of this electronics revolution will require significant advances in system integration, in our current understanding of human factors, and in practices and institutions which currently impede universal product consistency and rapid, widespread product deployment.

To guide further consideration, there are at least four kinds of in-vehicle electronics products that are of interest:

• Information products (route guidance, traffic advisories, in-vehicle signing, etc.)

• Diagnostic/prognostic products (low-tire pressure or fluid-level warnings, engine monitoring, cargo security and stability, etc.)

• Driver assistance products (curve speed warning, collision warning, Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC), stability control, traction control, lane departure warning, etc.)

• Active safety products (forward and rear collision avoidance, intersection collision avoidance, lane departure prevention)

Many of the applications provided through these products depend on or will perform better given an inbound stream of information on traffic conditions, roadway conditions, weather, etc.  In many cases, these same applications and vehicles are the most reliable, most cost-effective, and most readily deployed means to gather the raw data that feeds the creation of the information streams.  With appropriate sensors on board, road vehicles serving as probes will often be the best single source of information on current road and traffic conditions and weather.  Other sources, including road instrumentation, general surveillance, and conventional weather reporting, will round out this data.

More generally, the performance of at least some of these in-vehicle products can be enhanced or leveraged by infrastructure-based sensors and information exchange:

• Cooperative intersection decision support, intersection collision warning and avoidance

• Cooperative highway-rail intersection (HRI) warnings and crash avoidance

• Cooperative lane departure warning, lane guidance and lane keeping

• Use of the Nationwide Differential Global Position System (NDGPS), now being rolled out, for better geolocation

• Use of dedicated short-range communications to support infrastructure-vehicle and vehicle-vehicle communications, particularly in the 5.9GHz band allocated by the FCC for ITS safety applications

• Use of onboard diagnostic systems as input to the roadside inspection process for commercial vehicles

In-Vehicle Electronics and Vehicle-Infrastructure Cooperation

Advanced driver assistance systems, active safety systems, and cooperative vehicle-highway technology currently offer a greater promise of improved safety, enhanced mobility, and greater efficiency in the near and medium term.  Of these, the greatest impact will be in the safety arena, moving the safety emphasis from crash mitigation to crash avoidance.  This will be accomplished through a combination of sensors, driver assists, and selective operational intervention to provide such functionality as: stability control, traction control, vision enhancement (including night or fog assistance), driver drowsiness alerts, adaptive cruise control, self-aiming headlights, curve warnings, lane departure and road departure warnings and prevention, forward, side, and rear obstacle detection, collision warning and prevention systems, intersection collision warning, construction zone, pedestrian crossing, and highway-rail intersection warnings, and aids to compensate for the slower reflexes and less acute eyesight of elderly and physically impaired drivers, and for the lack of experience and potential lack of seasoned judgment of younger or newer drivers.  Some of this technology will be particularly valuable for preventing single-vehicle rural crashes and crashes involving commercial vehicles.

Getting the maximum benefit from these products depends on their ability to adapt to the general characteristics and current condition of individual drivers and to the current driving environment.  Safety systems need to respond differently for an alert and experienced 30-year old driver on an open road in good weather than for an elderly driver on crowded urban freeways during an after-dark snowstorm.  This kind of adaptability can potentially provide additional access and mobility for elderly, disabled, and other special situation drivers.  In addition to creating a safer driving experience for these drivers, such aids also empower elderly and physically impaired drivers to travel in their own vehicles at times and in circumstances (e.g. night, winter) that might otherwise be daunting, unacceptably stressful, or physically impossible.  It should be noted that by developing systems that improve usability for challenged drivers, the performance of all drivers would be enhanced.  This can be accomplished by gaining an understanding for humans’ fundamental capabilities and limitations in the driving task.

Adaptive in-vehicle electronics can also help to save fuel and reduce emissions by smoothing acceleration and deceleration (particularly for commercial vehicles and transit vehicles), automatically handling stop-and-go driving, anticipating and adjusting the throttle and transmission for varying road conditions and terrain, and by safely enabling small platoons of tightly spaced trucks, transit and other vehicles.  In the long run, safer vehicles could permit lighter-weight vehicles for greater fuel economy.  Route guidance products which help drivers to plan and follow an optimal route can significantly reduce miles driven (thereby saving fuel and helping to mitigate congestion), reduce the stress of unassisted route-following (safety and quality-of-life benefits), and help drivers avoid sudden maneuvers and unfavorable traffic or road conditions (safety benefits).  It is clearly undesirable, however, for drivers to lose their situational awareness in the driving environment because of distraction or overload from these in-vehicle systems.  It would be similarly undesirable for drivers to become overly dependent on an automated system to the extent that they engage in risk compensation behavior by assuming that the system will always keep them safe.  A primary challenge, then, is to balance the safety benefits and the risks of these driver-assistance systems.

The basic premise of ITS is that it saves lives, time, and money.  The safer driving technologies described above have enormous promise to enable savings on all three of these scales, especially if the public sector adopts safety-enhancing systems on the vehicles it uses and creates incentives for the adoption of such systems by others.  By doing so, they will save themselves time and money and help to safeguard the lives and well-being of their own staffs.

In-Vehicle Electronics

• System integration.  An increasing trend over the past several years is for vehicle manufacturers to acquire standalone turnkey products from first-tier suppliers that can be independently incorporated into the vehicle to increase its functionality.  However, this is not a viable approach for the new vehicle electronics, especially for active safety systems that are intended to take temporary control over critical vehicle functions (i.e., steering and brakes).  Products need to be integrated into an environment which includes an overall control structure to mediate among competing products (e.g. in an emergency situation when stability control, traction control, and collision-avoidance products are all attempting to use the brakes) to produce an uniform, sensible response.  Interfaces, controls, displays, and warnings also need to be consistent across systems.  For example, an urgent auditory safety alert in one system must not be confused with a ringing cell phone. 

• In addition, for reasonable economy, components (like sensors and external communications devices) must not be duplicated for each product.  Rather, a single instance of each relevant device must be present for consistent as-needed use by multiple information, warning, assistance, and safety products.  This kind of system integration is a technological, organizational, and commercial challenge.

• Information Requirements.  It will be a challenge to acquire and deliver sufficient information about the status of the roads for in-vehicle systems to perform successfully.  Infrastructure-based sensors will be valuable where already installed, and some expansion of this sensor base can be expected.  However, the burden of information gathering can most readily be borne by vehicle-based sensors (probes), especially along primary and secondary arterials.  This raises issues of information integrity, data sharing, and privacy.  Anticipating terrain changes, not just responding to them upon arrival, requires an accurate three-dimensional digital road map.  Anticipating road conditions requires widespread collection of probe data, its analysis, and its retransmission to approaching vehicles.

• Standards.  A critical factor for successful deployment of these systems is the development of standards for vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-roadside communications, as well as standards for onboard placement of equipment and driver message sets.  In addition, for this information to most effectively influence commercial vehicle operations, standards are needed for sharing traffic, weather, roadway, and other information with the dispatcher as well as the driver.

• Adaptability.  An important aspect of the user interface is to make it “environmentally adaptive,” so that driver condition and driving conditions are taken into account in determining the discretionary functionality and the information streams that are made available to the driver.  The electronic control logic, messages, etc. provided by the vehicle need to be carefully adjusted to the specific requirements of the driver as well as to the driver’s situation.  This applies generally, but it is particularly important when dealing with ranges of abilities and disabilities.  Vehicle electronics must be capable of being dynamically retuned for varying environmental circumstances (day vs. night, dry vs. wet vs. slippery pavement, low sun directly ahead or behind, etc.), varying driving circumstances (rural vs. urban roads, congested vs. freely flowing traffic, straight driving vs. complex exit/ramp configuration, etc.), and for different drivers of the same vehicle.

• Sensing in Cluttered Environments.  Collision avoidance in urban environments can be especially difficult because of “clutter” in the scene.  It can be difficult to distinguish collision hazards (vehicles, pedestrians, and obstacles in the roadway) from nearby safe objects (roadside signs, pedestrians on the sidewalk, parked cars).  Collision warning and avoidance systems for urban areas will need sophisticated in-vehicle sensors that can detect objects around the vehicle, characterize them, and predict their trajectories along with the trajectory of the equipped vehicle. Reliable, high-speed algorithms will have to assess the likelihood of collision and either generate appropriate warnings or take evasive action.

• Human Factors 1 — User Interface.  A primary challenge for the new in-vehicle products is incorporating an overall in-vehicle user interface that informs, supports, and assists but does not overwhelm or overload the driver.  At present, the “Driver Distraction/Driver Focus” issue is a hot topic, but its solution is not known and approaches to pursue solutions are not coordinated.  Multiple state and local jurisdictions are addressing various aspects of driver distraction in a totally uncoordinated and, too often, uninformed fashion.  Although standards development organizations (SDOs) are addressing this topic, the standards development process can be lengthy, and frequently follows products’ introduction to market.  This issue is further complicated by the number of vehicle, driver, and environmental variables that affect safe driving behavior, as well as concerns about proprietary product design and personal freedom.  Only by following sound human-factor principles of consistency and usability can the challenge of interface design be successfully addressed.

• Human Factors 2 — Compensation, Acceptance.  Introducing products with the potential to compensate for driver limitations, driver errors,or adverse conditions has the potential to encourage risk-taking behavior by drivers.  In addition, introducing products that assume some amount of control of the vehicle will require significant consciousness-raising to be accepted.  The transition between automated and manual control also needs to be evaluated more thoroughly.  A safe balance must be struck between a system assisting the driver and its completely taking over from the driver.  Ultimately, the vehicle operator must retain some degree of control and responsibility.

• Human Factors 3— Consistency in Human Interface.  There is a compelling case for consistency across vehicles in the behavior of at least some classes of in-vehicle safety products.  While it is probably not necessary for all information (e.g. route guidance, traffic information, routine traveler information) to be presented identically, some interactions should always be consistent and predictable.  Otherwise, making use of multiple in-vehicle systems (perhaps sharing a common display), or changing from one vehicle to another, means potentially being confronted with a different suite of safety-critical, time-critical cues.  The behavior of active safety systems in specific circumstances, the form and meaning of warnings, whether visual, audible, or haptic, must be consistent from model to model, make to make, country to country.  Vehicle manufacturers must be persuaded that for critical human factors aspects of safety systems (in particular), the need for consistency outweighs the need for product differentiation.

• Exploiting Gathered Data.  Over the next 5–7 years, telematics providers will start to collect a large volume of data from their customer vehicles both on traffic status and on the condition of the roads, to support active safety products.  A large amount of information will collected, with many potential side-benefits.  For example, condition-of-the-roads data will include air temperature, pavement temperature, pavement slipperiness and roughness, precipitation, etc.  This could be the source for much of the information needed by the new Maintenance and Construction Operations User Service of the National ITS Architecture as well as the source for very precise, micro-area weather forecasting.  However, no mechanisms are currently being contemplated for developing the relationships through which road-responsible and weather-responsible public agencies can have this information made available to them.  It is critical to maintain a philosophical and program-management connection between the Integrated Network of Transportation Information and Advanced Crash Avoidance Technologies.

• Antitrust Concerns.  Antitrust concerns may be an obstacle to vehicle manufacturer cooperation and to the establishment of joint multi-company research and development efforts to assure the uniformity of behavior of and user interface to the systems.

• Liability Concerns.  Liability concerns may be an obstacle to the prompt, responsible deployment of the new generation of in-vehicle electronics, unnecessarily postponing their benefits, including the reduction of fatalities.  This is generally recognized as being a far more acute problem in the U.S. than elsewhere in the world.

Research

• Establish a concerted program of joint public-private sector pre-competitive research through which vehicle manufacturers and suppliers can explore industry-wide approaches to safely integrating in-vehicle electronics (including passenger cars, transit vehicle, commercial vehicles, and specialty vehicles).  Addressing manufacturers’ proprietary and competitive concerns is an important component of this effort.

• Establish a concerted international program of research that comprehensively addresses driver behavior.  Such a program must be aimed at prescribing a consistent human interface both within a single vehicle and across vehicle lines and models.  The program must address situational awareness, driver distraction, focus, and workload, mechanisms to discourage risk compensation, etc.  Such research needs to be conducted primarily by vehicle manufacturers from at least the U.S., Europe, and Japan, with the participation and assistance of appropriate academic, private, and government research establishments.  In many cases, the U.S. will find that other global sectors are far ahead of the U.S. in pursuing this kind of research and that the primary orchestration may be of our own participation in these efforts.  U.S. DOT may need to engage the assistance of other executive departments (notably State and Commerce) as well as national research leaders (NSF, TRB, and NIST) to help create an effective international program.

• Research the characteristics and viability of cooperative collision warning systems that include both vehicle and infrastructure elements (such as intersection collision warnings.

• Explore the technical and social aspects of developing and implementing automated recording systems for violation enforcement.

• Continue and expand the current IVI program to evaluate future applications and generations of advanced ITS systems.  The U.S. DOT program should include participation by relevant public and private organizations and should complete several actions:

+         Continue to collect baseline driving data under naturalistic conditions.  This will provide critical information to assist developers of advanced driver assistance systems

+         Continue research on driver distraction and the performance specifications for next generation crash avoidance systems

+         Continue Field Operational Test Next Generation Crash Avoidance Systems.  Complete the current FOTs, and start a new series of FOTs that to explore infrastructure cooperation, vehicle-to-vehicle communications and other technology advancements.

Program

• Mount a campaign of outreach and education on the safety, efficiency, and mobility benefits of the new ITS products and how to use them properly.  Among other things, the program should discourage risk compensation and encourage the acceptance of electronic co-pilot assistance.

• Encourage public agencies to lead by example and help jump-start the market by specifying the inclusion of safety-, efficiency-, and economy-enhancing ITS products in the Federal fleet and by creating incentives for state and local public agencies and for   companies operating van pools to do the same.

• Encourage deployment and adoption of safety-enhancing ITS technologies via direct subsidies or by reducing taxes on vehicles that carry appropriate safety products.  Encourage insurance companies to consider ITS safety-enhancing technologies in determining premiums.

• Determine specific data needs, and establish the sensor, software, and communications structures for the widespread collection of probe data relating to traffic conditions, road and weather conditions, etc. and to work with map database suppliers to create the three-dimensional data needed to refine and enhance data collection.  Mechanisms need to be established to assure the quality and promote the sharing of this data.  Where the gathering of such information clearly advances the development and maintenance of a national integrated network of transportation information (or serves other worthy public purposes), U.S. DOT should consider defraying the cost of such data gathering, especially if the private collection of this information reasonably obviates an otherwise expensive public sector undertaking.

• Ensure that requirements for vehicle-infrastructure and vehicle-vehicle communications are well represented in the standards organizations and consortia that are developing relevant wireless protocols.

• Explore the possibility of creating incentives or subsidies for the deployment and use of safety devices, to advance the price learning curve and make safety devices available more quickly and more broadly.

Institutional

• Build mutually beneficial relationships between the public sector and telematics providers.  Public agencies can assist telematics providers in gathering certain varieties of traffic and road planning data.  Telematics providers will be able to provide public agencies with a wealth of data on traffic conditions, road conditions, and weather conditions.  Getting effective relationships built sooner rather than later will help to advance the programs of both the private and public sector.

Programmatic Theme #4: Advanced Transportation Management

Current Status and Opportunities

Advanced transportation management involves using advanced technology to intelligently and adaptively manage the flow of goods and people through the physical infrastructure.  There are two basic modes of advanced transportation management:

Advanced Transportation Management Systems in which the focus is on direct management of the infrastructure and the communication of useful information to travelers and vehicles.  The highest-profile systems monitor and control the roadway infrastructure, but this area also includes the use of guideways utilized by public transportation and railroad systems as well.

Advanced Transportation Automation Systems in which the infrastructure and vehicles communicate and interact.  Cooperative Vehicle Highway Automation Systems (CVHAS) are being actively researched, primarily for the purpose of safely increasing the effective capacity of the roadway system.  Other R&D focuses on automating commercial and public transportation vehicles in dedicated guideways, providing mechanisms to help guide road maintenance equipment (e.g. snowplows) accurately and quickly, especially under adverse conditions.

Advanced transportation management is not simple, involving a number of factors:

• A complex interaction of vehicles and their (individual and system-level) operators

• The physical infrastructure and related management and control facilities and equipment

• The institutions and organizations that own, build, operate and maintain the transportation system

• The data that is collected, analyzed and disseminated as raw data or transformed into information.

The security of physical and electronic systems and ITS communications impact the traveler, public agency, and private service provider alike. They can:

• impact the ability to manage and operate transportation facilities (highway and transit) in a safe and efficient manner due to tampering with control functions and information flows;

• negatively impact the quality and timeliness of data necessary to support credible (and profitable) traveler information services;

• reduce the security and integrity of personal and agency financial transactions;

• reduce the traveler’s peace-of-mind with respect to privacy and personal security within the transportation network; and

• impact the efficient movement of freight and create opportunities to tamper with private business activities.

Over the next ten years, progress will be made in understanding these complex relationships and in achieving many of the benefits possible from application of advanced transportation management.

Advanced Transportation Automation Systems

Over the next decade, research and development will be conducted on mechanisms through which the traffic management system can take an active role in controlling selected vehicle types, increasing the capacity of controlled lanes, and producing a variety of operational efficiencies.  Several modalities are now being researched:

• Automated transit systems in dedicated rights-of-way to increase the operational efficiency of transit systems

• Automated precision docking of vehicles to improve service to transit patrons, particularly the disabled, the young and the elderly

• Automated trucks in dedicated lanes of urban and/or intercity corridors to facilitate quicker, safer, and more cost-effective goods movement

• Automatically guided snow removal vehicles for regions affected by winter weather to increase the efficiency of clearance operations in all weather conditions

• Automated on-board monitoring and inspection systems for clearance of commercial vehicles in such areas as vehicle safety, cargo clearance, and weight.

This research will lay the groundwork for evaluating the costs and benefits of fully automated passenger vehicles and for conducting R&D in the area of Cooperative Vehicle-Highway Automation Systems (CVHAS). 

As the science of advanced transportation management improves, these outcomes will result:

• System operators will know the current status of their part of the transportation system, whether the focus is transit, commercial vehicles, trains, or automobiles.  They will also have a better understanding of how their part of the transportation system integrates with the transportation system as a whole.

• System operators will have enhanced ability to predict and optimally manage traffic flows, including the ability to incorporate current and forecasted weather conditions.

• Transportation and public safety operators will be able to respond to and manage traffic incidents more safely, efficiently, and effectively.   They will have reliable tools to help mitigate the effects of major disasters, whether human-made or natural.

• System operators, their managers, and the public will be able to evaluate the actions taken to determine their effectiveness, providing better accountability and a more robust sense of system performance.

• Travelers and freight carriers will be better informed as data is collected and disseminated to them.

• Research on vehicle-highway automation can lead to greater efficiency and greater   roadway capacity without greater construction, and provide safety benefits as well.  Travel times will not be only shorter, but also more reliable and predictable because automation reduces variability of traffic conditions.  It may also be possible to reduce lane widths for light-duty vehicles.

• Automated vehicle operations can eliminate the stop-and-go transients that waste energy and generate excessive pollutant emissions today.  If the vehicles are operated at the very small separations that have already been publicly demonstrated, their aerodynamic drag can be reduced significantly, further reducing fuel consumption and emissions.

These outcomes will lead to a number of benefits.  Enhanced management of the transportation system can enable better system reliability and safety, more effective incident response, better coordination of traffic and travel across modes to reduce travel times and congestion.  Savings from reduced delays can benefit all travelers.  More freely flowing traffic also reduces energy requirements and will lead to better air quality.

Safety can be enhanced.  Advanced management systems and vehicle-highway automation can help prevent incidents by:

• reducing congestion and keeping traffic flowing freely;

• making work zones and highway-rail intersections smarter;

• managing travel speeds in anticipation of and in reaction to changing weather conditions;

• clearing incidents more quickly, thereby reducing secondary incidents and the resultant congestion.

Advanced transportation management can provide information to fleet managers regarding their fleets and how best to utilize and direct them.  The efficiency and economy of transit buses can be significantly enhanced through technologies such as automatic vehicle location, remote engine monitoring and regional transit signal priority systems.  The mainline screening of large vehicles and other automated regulatory enforcement tools can speed freight traffic, especially trucks, resulting in substantial savings.  Better transportation management can help to moderate congestion around major sports and musical events and other mass gatherings of people.  Positive Train Control can enable better scheduling of train movement and track/wayside maintenance to optimize and increase the safety and effective capacity of the rail system.

Along with the necessary capital infrastructure investment, the improved coordination required for advanced transportation management can lead to improved efficiency in regional traffic, transit, and incident management, and more comprehensive traveler information.  Coordination among relevant agencies also leads to improvements in efficiencies as agencies share capital, staffing, operations, and maintenance resources. 

Advanced Transportation Automation Systems

• Vehicle-Infrastructure Relationship.  As vehicles become smarter and as the ability to manage and control the infrastructure and traffic flows improves, practitioners must better understand the relationship between vehicles and the infrastructure under various circumstances including time of day, season, weather, etc. and put in place management strategies and technologies reflective of this relationship.

• Chicken-and-Egg Dilemma.  It may be difficult to justify the high cost of infrastructure technology for vehicle-highway automation until a large number of vehicles are capable of participating.  However, selling the vehicle technology for vehicle-highway automation will be difficult until large amounts of infrastructure are ready for this interaction.  This problem may be less severe for special cases like transit automation.  Incremental deployment plans need to be developed to show benefits exceeding costs at each stage of deployment, so that decision makers can be comfortable with each successive investment decision.

• Physical or Logical Infrastructure.  There is still considerable controversy about whether the infrastructure side of vehicle-highway automation should focus on instrumenting physical roadways or on developing a software-based infostructure that communicates to vehicles via telematics services providers.  Research and market evolution over the next ten years will probably resolve this controversy.

• Public perception.  Public perception of feasibility and desirability of CVHAS varies widely across the population, and there will always be some that are frightened by or simply dislike the prospect of vehicle automation.

• Legal issues.  Liability and insurance issues need to be addressed throughout the development process, since CVHAS represents such a significant change from current driving conditions.

Research

Advanced Transportation Automation Systems

• Continue to research the appropriate relationship between the vehicle and infrastructure and appropriate advanced transportation management and control strategies.

• Explore in depth the costs and benefits (including private sector return on investment) of various levels of transportation automation and of various mixes of responsibility between the vehicle and the infrastructure.

• Establish a mechanism for cooperation among public agencies, private industry, and the research community to pursue research on CVHAS, perhaps building on the existing eleven-state regional pooled-fund program.  This mechanism should include the traditional infrastructure community, both public-sector organizations (AASHTO, APTA, IBTTA, etc.) and private transportation design and construction.  Also, automotive manufacturers and suppliers, the insurance industry, and the telecommunications and information technology industries should participate.  Finally, user communities such as the trucking industry, AAA, and AARP should be involved.

• Further explore the development of tools to automate infrastructure construction and maintenance

• Establish linkages with the US Department of Defense (US DOD) to facilitate technology transfer and resource leveraging on CVHAS research.

• Establish linkages with the US Department of Energy (DOE) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to extend CVHAS research into its effects on fuel efficiency and the environment.

• Establish linkages with the US Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Office of Homeland Defense to promote advanced transportation management capabilities for use both in crisis management and in critical infrastructure protection and disaster prevention activities.

• Seriously explore policy issues related to successful CVHAS deployment, including liability, public perceptions and desires, and funding.  The effort must identify and recommend courses of action on all issues that impeded the operational use of CVHAS.

• If cost-justified, institute a coordinated national effort of research and development on the key technical, deployment staging, and societal and institutional issues relevant to transportation automation.

Program

Advanced Transportation Automation Systems

• Establish linkages with the US Department of Defense (US DOD) to facilitate technology transfer and resource leveraging on issues relevant to transportation automation.  As the nation’s largest shipper, U.S. DOD is an important potential user and beneficiary of transportation automation.

• Establish linkages with the US. Department of Energy (DOE) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to extend transportation automation research into its effects on fuel efficiency and the environment.

Enabling Theme #3 – Government’s Role in Expanding User Awareness and Usage 

Research

• Study and recommend new models for large-scale cooperative private-sector precompetitive research, which can draw on federal funding resources without being unduly delayed either by contracting issues or by too low a level of government management of the process.

• Study the more successful European and Asian models used to support private interests in the quick development and deployment of ITS technologies and services.

Program

• Integrate private sector intelligent vehicle activities with the public infrastructure.  Interaction needs to occur between the private and public sectors to determine how mostly private-sector-oriented intelligent vehicles will interface with a mostly public infrastructure.  Support for these interactions must be developed.

• Lead by example. Help jump-start the market by specifying the inclusion of safety, efficiency-, and economy-enhancing ITS products in the government fleets and by creating incentives for state and local public agencies and for companies operating van pools to do the same.

• Consider and implement adjustments to product liability legislation so that safety-enhancing products are not delayed in coming to market.

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For More Information ...

... contact the Intelligent Transportation Society of America (ITS America) at www.itsa.org. 

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