Working on common Frameworks for the Quality of European ITS Services and their Data

Who we are and what we do

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.

EU EIP sub-activity 4.1 is dedicated to frameworks and guidelines to describe and assess the quality for ITS data and ITS services in Europe.

A major driver for this sub-activity is that the efficiency and acceptance of ITS services heavily depend on (minimum) quality targets from the perspective of a traveler. An example how quality may be perceived in a C-ITS service is illustrated in the figure above. However, so far, there has been no agreed approach to define quality aspects and corresponding (minimum) quality levels for ITS.

To address this, the sub-activity elaborated a set of quality frameworks for several ITS data and service domains. These frameworks, called the Quality Packages, add quality aspects to parallel ITS implementation and pilot projects across Europe.

The Quality Packages contain quality-related definitions and concepts, as proposed and agreed by EU EIP partners for the use in Europe:
– A set of Quality Criteria in the categories Level of Service (describing the provision of data) and Level of Quality (describing the data as such),
– Specific Quality Requirements for individual ITS services, and
– A set of proposed Quality Assessment Methods.

The results are based on evidence from conditions and operating environments in combination with the expert knowledge of the public and private stakeholders involved in the EU EIP quality work.

The work is separated for different ITS domains, corresponding to the priority actions of the EC ITS Directive, and conducted in an iterative approach, see the following figure.

Besides such Quality Packages, some side tasks explore the quality roles and actions in the evolving ITS ecosystem. One task defines the relevant stakeholders, value chains, recommended work processes, when dealing with ITS quality. Another task “Optimum Quality” examines optimisation aspects in terms of quality, from the perspective of European road authorities.

There are important cross-links to several achievement areas of EU EIP:

  • The Reference Handbook for harmonized ITS Core Service Deployment in Europe provides brief conceptual information on quality issues and provides references to the quality packages.
  • The quality package on C-ITS is still under development. Once full fledged, it will provide a significant ingredient of integrating C-ITS into day-to-day business of road operators.
  • The quality packages are focused on quality of data and information. Procedural aspects such as compliance declarations with the rules of Delegated Regulations under the ITS Directive are available at the NAP achievement page.  

What we achieved

The collection of reports produced is available below:

Quality of ‘Safety-Related‘ and ‘Real-Time Traffic Information Services

Quality of ‘Multimodal Travel Information Services

Quality of ‘Intelligent Truck Parking Services

C-ITS Information Quality

Definition of stakeholders, value chains, recommended work processes

Optimum Quality of ITS

We organized workshops and made presentations at different events to disseminate our work. The documentation of workshops and fora is linked here:

30 March, 2017 – Workshop on Quality of Multimodal Traveller Information Services, Brussels, BE

21 March, 2018 – Follow-up Workshop on Quality of Multimodal Traveller Information Services, Amsterdam, NL

15 November, 2018 – Quality of ITS data and services, European ITS Forum 2018, Utrecht, NL

6 November, 2019 – Data & Information Quality for C-ITS, C-ITS deployment and evaluation workshop, Brussels, BE

14 December, 2020 – Introduction and discussion of Quality Package for C-ITS Information, online

17 December, 2020 – Introduction and validation of Quality Package for Intelligent Truck Parking Services (ITPS), online