Visualize 200 million vehicles, communicating with each other and the roadway, sharing information about their locations and operations. Drivers could be warned of red-light runners, preventing wrecks; motorists would receive information instantly on travel times and roadway conditions; vehicle manufacturers would get instantaneous vehicle-diagnostic information.
With recent advances in communications technology, all of this is potentially available—and it is being explored through a partnership of the American Association of State Highway & Transportation Officials (AASHTO), the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) and the world’s automakers.
Three developments have made this possible. First, there are advancements under the U.S. DOT-sponsored Intelligent Vehicle Safety Initiative (IVI). Second, communications technology, including wireless systems, has evolved. Finally, there is a growing emphasis on crash avoidance and roadway management and operations. The integration of these opportunities will require some work, though.
Vehicle-roadway integration will require new equipment in vehicles, a wireless communications infrastructure, accurate global-positioning maps, information policies acceptable to the public and hardware and software to put it all together.
The Vehicle Infrastructure Integration (VII) coalition has been established to explore ways to achieve this integration and its benefits for safety, mobility and e-commerce. The coalition consists of the Federal Highway Administration, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), AASHTO (represented by 10 states including California, Washington, Utah, Idaho, Minnesota, Michigan, New York, New Jersey, Georgia and Florida) and eight
automobile manufacturers including General Motors, Ford, BMW, DaimlerChrysler, Volkswagen, Toyota, Honda and Nissan.
The ultimate vision is to have every vehicle equipped with a special radio that can communicate with other vehicles and with hundreds of thousands of special roadside transmitters. The radios will be based on a special spectrum assigned by the Federal Communications Commission, known as “dedicated short-range communications.”
What it’s good for:
Safety
Intersection collisions and road-departure accidents account for more than 50% of the fatalities on our roads. These types of accidents can be reduced by vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communication.
Dr. Jeffrey Runge, the administrator of NHTSA, sees such approaches as promising for highway safety: “We are reaching the point of diminishing returns by focusing only on crashworthiness,” he said. “The biggest return on investment, in terms of lives saved and injuries prevented, in the future will come from accelerated development and deployment of crash-avoidance technologies.”
To prevent intersection wrecks, vehicles would communicate their positions, directions and speed to other vehicles and the intersection.
For example, in a signalized intersection, the approaching vehicles would broadcast their direction and speed and would receive information about signal changes.
Mobility
State departments of transportation have paid much attention to traffic management—the term commonly used for this is “operations”—because of continued growth in travel, with relatively little capacity able to be added in recent years. Examples are traffic-management centers, roadway surveillance, work-zone management, speedy wreck clearance (dubbed “incident management”) and response to bottlenecks. System-wide, real-time information is the key to improving management and operations.
Signal data could be obtained from appropriately equipped vehicles that could provide site-specific traffic conditions and travel times. Weather conditions, including pavement slipperiness, also could be determined as it developed. As a result, tailored information could go directly to motorists and traffic-management centers.
Motorists would receive information right in their vehicles, through visual map displays or voice broadcast. Traffic-management centers would receive traffic information that would allow early warnings of roadway icing and incidents, allowing them to respond rapidly.
Commissioner John Njord of the Utah Department of Transportation, who chairs the VII Executive Leadership Team, said transportation officials bear an “awesome responsibility” of providing safety for the millions of motorists who use transportation systems daily.
“We owe it to them to take our technology and our thinking to the next level, and working together with the auto industry I’m confident we can get there,” Njord said.
Consumer and commercial services
There are a variety of possibilities for consumer services that could be done with “intelligent vehicles” such as toll payments, parking assistance and payments, concierge assistance and remote vehicle diagnostics. These applications could be developed by vehicle manufactures working with other businesses and entrepreneurs.
Dedicated to communication
The foundation of the vehicle-road communications system is the dedicated short-range communication (DSRC) system. DSRC is 75 MHz of spectrum assigned by the Federal Communications Commission to public safety and mobility and some commercial uses, with safety receiving the highest priority. DSRC has special speed characteristics making it the only spectrum that can provide the transmission speeds required for safety applications.
The 75 MHz of spectrum is very large and may have a value of $6 billion, based on recent spectrum auctions. Consequently, the VII Coalition sees an opportunity and an obligation to fully explore DSRC for safety and mobility applications.
Technical groups are working on details for the use and management of the DSRC system. An industry consortium comprising TransCore, SIRIT, Mark IV and Raytheon is developing operating standards and building prototypes for testing.
There are seven channels available on DSRC. One is dedicated to control; priorities are assigned to applications for the other channels. Eight priority levels are proposed to handle all potential applications. The first three levels are for safety, including Level 1 for vehicle safety, Level 2 for responder safety and Level 3 for all other safety. Levels 4 through 8 would carry signals for mobility and commercial services. As signal loads are expected to be substantial, priorities will need to be not only assigned but also enforced in some way.
Security and privacy are likely to be at issue. Some type of encryption will probably be needed for a secure DSRC system. The operating parameters of individual vehicle and roadside units will need periodic checkups.
In addition to DSRC, other wireless networks may come into play. For example, several cities have recently announced they will deploy wireless networks in their communities. Cellular or other networks, already broadly available throughout the country, may offer bandwidth for some nonsafety applications. The VII Coalition is investigating the potential of such alternatives.
The Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) is working on data dictionaries and message sets for vehicle-to-vehicle communications, infrastructure-to-vehicle communications and vehicle-to-infrastructure communications. The generic vehicle-to-vehicle message has been developed, and work is starting on the other two areas.
Banding together
The VII Coalition in 2003 created a working group with members from U.S. DOT, 10 state transportation departments and the automakers. It is subdivided into task forces on technical issues, institutional issues, business models and outreach. After more than a year of work, the group presented progress reports Feb. 9 and 10 of this year before more than 250 interested parties from the private and public sectors.
The Technical Working Group presented the VII Architecture and Functional Requirements now being reviewed by experts from other industries.
The Institutional Issues Team focused on such issues as privacy, data ownership, data access and liability. However, the majority of work to date has been on privacy because of its importance and the public’s interest.
The Business Models Task Force discussed various applications in safety and mobility and presented a set of “use cases,” which are more detailed descriptions of individual applications such as intersection collision avoidance. The state transportation departments have reviewed more than 100 use cases and ranked them by potential benefits. The state DOTs are seeking enhancements in system productivity, safety, customer service, security and the environment. The automakers seek improvements in safety, vehicle quality and the opportunity for new businesses from a national communications network.
A VII website will be available from ITS America (www.itsa.org) in the near future where all of the presentations made in February will be available to the public.
The Executive Leadership Team is slated to meet again late in March to make plans for future cooperative work.
Bob Lange, executive director for structure and safety integration at General Motors, notes that technology already exists in much of the vehicle fleet to provide safety, security and emergency services—and such aids as remote door unlocking—to consumers wirelessly.
“The addition of DSRC to the wireless services already available will let auto engineers better assist drivers in collision avoidance through warning alerts and messages or perhaps eventually through control intervention,” Lange said.
Work to be done
Over the next four years, the VII working committee has slated a series of technical and institutional queries. Plans include DSRC prototype development, standards development, business analysis and proposals and a large field operational test.
By 2008 the coalition expects to have enough information to support a preliminary decision regarding nationwide deployment of VII.
Costs
Preliminary work has been completed on a high-level cost model for deploying the roadside units. Florida was used as an example:
The number of Florida intersections that were the scene of 85% of intersection wrecks were identified. Roadside units would be placed at all those intersections, as well as one per mile on the state’s urban freeways and one every five miles on rural freeways.
The number of roadside units was then compared with the population and the number of miles of freeway in Florida to get a normalized ratio of units to population and freeway miles. The normalized unit number was then extrapolated to all the states in the continental U.S. for a national estimate on the number of roadside units required.
The result was an estimate of $3 billion, based on a cost of $3,000 per unit. The result is considered preliminary, and more detailed analysis is being done to obtain a more in-depth cost estimate.
Long-term management and operations
The networking and operations of a nationwide DSRC network would carry substantial operational cost. Thus far there has been no specific estimate of that component of cost.
It has been suggested that an operational entity be created to oversee long-term VII operations. Options include contracting with a nonprofit, a federally chartered corporation or a government agency. Existing entities mentioned include AAMVAnet (operated by the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators), COMSAT, the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Federal Aviation Administration.
Deployment of roadside units would be coordinated with the rollout of equipped vehicles. A three-year schedule for deploying numerous roadside units, in advance of the arrival of equipped vehicles, is being considered. Possibly a single entity will be contracted to deploy the units in all locations. It could operate the systems or just place and integrate the units into a national network.
Frankly, the value of such a deployment to VII stakeholders is a major consideration, so an upcoming task of the working group is to quantify those benefits.
AASHTO is committed to work alongside U.S. DOT and the automobile industry to explore the potential of VII. This is not only a national endeavor but a global exploration. AASHTO has held executive roundtables with other nations and plans more to benefit from research done in other countries along similar lines as well.
TME
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