The European ITS Platform (EU EIP) serves as Technical ITS Knowledge Management Centre to National Road Authorities and Road Operators partnering in the EU EIP community, to the European Commission in their roles as funding and regulatory institution as well as to stakeholders and multi-stakeholder collaborations engaged in preparing Facilitating automated driving deployment.
With the current growth and investment in automated driving it is important that road authorities and operators are participating and informed. The scope of our activities was to prepare road authorities and operators to make decisions on facilitating automated driving and automating their own core business. The expert group on automating road operators’ own ITS was part of EU EIP sub-activity 4.2 – Facilitating Automated Driving.
The first objective for our work was to identify the requirements of automating the road operators´ ITS systems to facilitate automated vehicle – infrastructure integration. This includes the roadside ITS systems with properties like: self-maintenance, self-optimisation, self-management, self-healing fully or partly based on specific needs.
Based on our research, as well as the feedback received from the stakeholders, the following functions of the Traffic Management Centers were selected as the most relevant for automation of operations:
A second objective was to look at existing developments to identify good and avoidable practices in implementing automatic functions on roadside and traffic centre systems.
Finally, we also proposed an Action plan for automation of road operator ITS which is presented in the figure below:
The collection of reports
We organized workshops and made presentations at different events to disseminate our work.