Cooperative ITS
The concept behind Cooperative ITS (C-ITS) has evolved in the last few years from leading-edge research.
It now provides the framework for all new ITS deployments. Q-Free has been at the center of this evolution, with an involvement in research projects, standardization and pilot product design. The company is now offering this competence and products to the emerging national pilot projects and trans-national corridors. It is also able to help prepare current ITS deployments for the evolution to C-ITS.
Planning
Even though C-ITS standards and specifications are reasonably mature, those with an expert overview of the entire system are few and far between. There are many people working on the subset of V2X communications, rather fewer with an understanding of the needs of infrastructure and national/urban authorities. Q-Free has a proven track record of support on the authority side of standards and projects, and offers to help the infrastructure side in specifying open standards that avoid vendor lock-in. These services are usually offered as part of a larger Research and Development effort but more restricted planning activities can also be supported.
Technology
C-ITS technology has been tested within numerous European Research and Development projects over the last 10 years. Q-Free has been a central supplier of equipment to many of these. This started in the CVIS project, where Q-Free supplied several hundred vehicle and roadside ITS stations. A second generation was developed for the eCoMove project, and recently Q-Free has completed its third generation of pilot product, the Universal ITS Station. This Universal ITS Station can function as a vehicle mounted or roadside device.
Production Information
The basic architecture for Cooperative ITS is described in ISO 21217. The concept is based on peer-to-peer communication between four different types of ITS Stations: Vehicle, Roadside, Central and Personal. An ITS Station is well defined, managed and strongly secured according to the standards.
Q-Free supplies solutions for all four C-ITS areas as shown on the following drawing. We will integrate the new C-ITS architecture into existing systems. This is done by linking any proprietary protocols from legacy systems into the corresponding ITS Station. The standards specify how this is done via gateways to manage and secure the bidirectional flow of information between legacy and C-ITS.
