Advancing global standards together in Ljubljana

From 20-21 June 2023, TISA and its members congregated for TISA’s annual General Assembly, hosted and organised by TISA member REALIS, in Slovenia’s capital city Ljubljana. The meeting took place at the Crystal Palace, Slovenia’s tallest building, which offers magnificent views of the city and its surrounds.  TISA’s President Thomas Kusche-Knezevic  and attending members were welcomed by Mr Andrej Ribič, Member of the Management Board of the Slovenian Motorway Operator DARS, which manages more than 625 km of motorways across the country.

Due to Slovenia’s location within the heart of Europe, it has a natural need to cooperate and seek  innovative solutions for its traffic management. ‘Our goal is to establish an effective, integrated system that will cope with today’s challenges. The basis for good decision-making is the availability and quality of traffic data. DARS ensures the constant installation of various roadside equipment for data collection on the one hand and traffic management systems on the other.’

TISA also invited Adriano Palao Bernal, Technical Manager at the safety organisation Euro NCAP, to the General Assembly, who presented an overview of Euro NCAP’s requirements and future vision. He also revealed how overall vehicle safety can be enhanced from the effective delivery of traffic information and that from 2026, Euro NCAP will encourage and incentivise vehicle manufacturers to share Local Hazard information to maximise interoperability and penetration rates. For this, closer collaboration between vehicle manufacturers, service providers and road authorities, is key.  Stephanie Leonard of TomTom commented ‘Euro NCAP as an independent organisation is able to push the needle much faster on developments in safety than regulators, making it an ideal facilitator.’ Euro NCAP and TISA agreed to intensify collaboration about these topics.

At the Assembly, TISA was delighted to give former Treasurer Andras Gorsak the TISA Fellowship. He is one of only six Fellows ever awarded. Thanking him for his tireless work, TISA President  Thomas Kusche-Knezevic  said ‘The role of the Treasurer is one that needs a lot of trust, sensitivity and very often a thick skin. TISA has been fortunate to find someone who fitted this description like a blueprint. He has weighed up the opportunities and risks of financial decisions before others knew there were some. We thank him for all the successes that TISA was able to achieve through his forward-looking work.’

 

 

Stephanie Leonard of TomTom takes on new role as TISA Chairwoman

In June at TISA’s General Assembly, Stephanie Leonard, Head of Government and Regulatory Affairs at TomTom, was nominated for on a new role as Chairwoman, assisting TISA and its President Thomas Kusche- Knežević with a new forward-thinking strategy and direction for the future. ‘I am excited to begin this new journey with TISA as Chairwoman, ‘ she said.

With her hands-on and highly developed experience of traffic management and digital maps, she is the ideal candidate to assist in this organisation that focuses on developing global standards that meet the needs of all stakeholders in the mobility sector.

‘I truly believe TISA has a unique opportunity to bring together and realign the pieces of the ITS jigsaw puzzle by leveraging its community and collaborative culture. I also believe TISA’s work on standards can be widened to more areas like regulatory compliance and natural disasters recovery. I can’t wait to get started!’

 

ITS Congress Lisbon – the Game Changer

During the ITS European Congress from 22-24 May, TISA will be presenting two sessions at Lisbon’s Congress Centre. The first is Emergency Alerts & Warnings for Drivers, Automated Vehicles and beyond on Monday 22 May from 11.45-12.45 in Auditorium 3. The Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction (2015) aims to “substantially increase the availability of and access to multi-hazard early warning systems to people by 2030”. Substantial progress has been made with the global adoption of the CAP protocol. Large-scale emergencies are already a challenge to drivers, for example due to the lack of knowledge of the local environment, language barriers. This SIS will present ready-to-use solutions targeted to drivers as well as work-in-progress addressing ADV and situations where the availability of communication is an issue.

Danny Woolard (GEWI) sets the scene with experiences from Australia (floodings, bush fires and how to manage traffic in case of such events), Teun Hendriks, TISA (inventor of TPEG2 EAW) speaks on technical topics, logical data models, efficient data encoding schemes and EAW for automated driving vehicles. Thomas Kusche-Knezevic (TISA President) presents on TPEG2 EAW live public services in Germany. Eliot Christian (Alert-Hub.org), presents on the status of global CAP deployment. Katarzyna Porzuc (EUSPA), dives into the development of a new satellite-based warning system and finally Daniel Tuttenuj (BBK-German Federal Office of Civil Protection and Disaster Assistance) relates the experiences from the German TPEG2-EAW field trials: large-scale catastrophes or emergencies. TISA and the BBK have developed TPEG2 Emergency Alert & Warning (EAW) an application to disseminate Alerts to travellers/public at large and warn about emergencies. The session will present the field trials results conducted in Germany and the benefits of Public and Private Cooperation.

The second session is Standardisation requirements for Active Mobility, taking place on Tuesday 23 May from 11.45 to 12.45 in Session Room 1.8. Sustainable mobility means that new mobility modes need to be integrated into data ecosystems that rely on existing standards such as DATEX, TMC/TPEG, NeTEx, SIRI – the goal of this session is to address potential overlaps and to ensure harmonization.  Speakers include Samuel Pierce of (Cycling Industries Europe, CIE), Stephanie Chaufton, (TISA) on why standards for active mobility are needed; Ronald Jorna (MOVECO) on experiences of the BITS, Danny Woolard (GEWI) and Jörg Freudenstein (AlbrechtConsult GmbH) on embedding cycling data in DATEX II.

The ITS European Congress 2023 brings together companies and organisations from the ITS ecosystem to discuss the latest developments in smart mobility. TISA will be presenting these sessions in the context of the larger discussions related to intelligent transport solutions.

TISA presents at the 19th Open Auto Drive Forum Event in Chicago

On 9 May, the TISA team attended the 19th Open Auto Drive Forum Event held at HERE in Chicago, USA. TISA joined the meeting with other OADF member organizations that included ADASIS, NDS, SENSORIS, SIP-adus, as well as TN-ITS. Executive Director Matthias Unbehaun and TISA member Andras Csepinszky updated participants about the latest standards updates in the field of automated driving.

The event was opened by Jeff Raimo, Senior Director, Global Head of Content Product Planning at HERE and introduced UniMap, HERE’s mapping technology that creates fresher and more accurate maps. Andras Csepinszky of NNG, spokesperson for OADF and co-chair of SENSORIS, introduced OADF for those attending for the first time.

By popular demand, NDS technical coordinator Fabian Klebert was invited to the meeting to explain the role of serialization in the various standards and why the NDS chose zserio rather than Protobuf, which is used in many other standards. In his presentation, he compared the two approaches in detail in terms of features, code quality, data size, and encoding/decoding speed.

The second invited talk was given by Takeshi Doihara, ISO/TC204/WG3 Expert and ISO/TC211/JWG11 Co-Convenor for the Geographic Data Files (GDF) standard. He first explained the scope of ISO/TC204 (Intelligent Transportation Systems) and TC211 (Geographic Information/Geomatics) and the importance of these standards for GDF development. Another focus of his presentation was the difference between GDF5.1-1 (GDF 5.0) and GDF 5.1-2 and the feature representation in GDF5.1. Furthermore, he reported on the harmonization between GDF and ISO 191xx and the planned revisions of GDF.

The OADF member organisations and ASAM  were then given the opportunity to report on their recent activities:

• Matthias Unbehaun, TISA managing director, provided information on TPEG2 and the requirements and ongoing discussions of the follow-up version related to automated driving.
• András Csepinszky, co-chair of SENSORIS and of NNG, reported on the latest SENSORIS version 1.6 and the planning for SENSORIS 2.0.
• Jean-Charles Pandazis, ADASIS Coordinator and from ERTICO, reported that ADASIS v3 – 3.0.0. has just been released for review. It includes new profiles for speed limits and a request-and-response mechanism.
• Benjamin Engel, CTO at ASAM, gave an overview of the OpenX standards, with particular focus on the Offroad Concept Project, the ASAM Text Specification, and the ASAM OpenODD.
• Martin Schleicher, NDS chair and Elektrobit representative to NDS, gave an overview of recent advances in NDS.Live and explained how NDS.Live can now be used to distribute map data in various scenarios.
• Satoru Nakajo, SIP-adus founding member from the University of Tokyo, reported on the results of the SIP-adus program in Japan, which ended in March 2023, and on planned follow-up activities.
• Christian Kleine, TN-ITS President and from HERE, introduced TN-ITS and reported on progress towards alignment with DATEXX II and TN-ITS.

At the end of the event, Steffen Kuhn from Elektrobit organized a workshop on reliable maps for automated driving for the on-site participants. His teaser presentation on this topic sparked a lively discussion about Reliable Map Attributes (RMAs) and RMA deviation types. TISA looks forward to celebrating OADF’s 20^th meeting at the next event.

Updates with TISA team in Brussels

TISA’s Committee meetings are an opportunity to catch up on changes in standardisation and discuss the direction for TISA’s policy, but also an opportunity to hear from external actors in the industry. This was exactly the case when members met up in earlier in the year in Brussels from 14-15 March 2023. Guest speakers included Stephanie Leonard, Head of Government and Regulatory Affairs at TomTom who gave fellow Members an appraisal of the French Environmental decree that went into force last summer and the future EU RTTI regulation and encouraged TISA to set up an information session for members.  Anastasia Founta joined the Committee meeting and presented the project Data4PT.

Anastasia Founta from DATA4PT pointed out to members that accurate, quality, and standardised data is currently ‘not in the place it needs to be.’ She went on to present the DATA4PT project that aims to advance data-sharing practices in the public transport sector by supporting the development of data exchange standards and models, so fulfilling the needs of multimodal travel information service providers. By supporting EU Member States in deploying a set of harmonised European public data standards (Transmodel, NeTEx and SIRI), DATA4PT wants to deliver union-wide multimodal travel information services and contribute to a seamless door-to-door travel ecosystem across Europe that covers all mobility services. The project does so by providing capacity building through a series of webinars and offering customised training through National Access Points.

TISA discussed a variety of topics including the hazard of potholes, trucks on minor roads as well as the latest on up-coming EU regulations in the sphere such as the ITS Directive. The next Committee meetings will take place in Ljubljana, Slovenia from 20-21 June 2023. Contact: s.chaufton@tisa.org for registration.