Connected and Automated Driving at the heart of TISA’s September Committee Meetings

An insight into a Connected Corridor for Driving Automation, the moral consequences of Autonomous Driving product developments and an innovation hub for autonomous driving. TISA’s September Committee Meetings started at full speed and gave Members the opportunity to exchange knowledge and ideas with three external organisations and to catch-up with the TISA’s overall reporting.

The first presentation concerned the European-funded project CONCORDA (Connected Corridor for Driving Automation), presented by ERTICO Senior Manager Dr. Eusebiu Catana. CONCORDA contributes to the preparation of the European motorways for automated driving and high density truck platooning with adequate connected services and technologies. The main objective of the Action is to assess performances (reliability/availability) of hybrid communication systems, combining 802.11p and LTE under real traffic situations. The project is deployed in seven Pilot sites in five Member States of the European Union (Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Germany and Spain) and aims at guaranteeing the interoperability and continuity of its services on all test sites according to the C-ITS Platform recommendations.

From a test to the other, Robert Siddi, Sales Director at ZalazONE, gave an insight into this European hub project that comprises a test field for Autonomous Vehicles. Unique in its kind, ZalaZone is one of the European centres testing and piloting 5G developments in telecommunications (since 2019), with a EUR 127 million public investment on a 265-hectare area. The hub aims to offer technologically advanced laboratories for educational and research purposes and become one of the main centres of Autonomous Vehicle developments in Europe. A key component of the project is the smart city zone concept, an environment for research and testing of future technologies both in a downtown and suburban context.

Last but not least, TISA Members were given food for thought on Moral Consequences of AD Product Development with a presentation by Nora Blessing from TomTom. Current AD technology can manoeuvre without hitting obstacles, but lacks a great amount of fine-tuning. Today’s situation still presents major roadblocks, such as the lack of robust software that can make human-like decisions in any possible scenario, softwares that do not always recognise humans on the road and accidents and system failures that still occur. In addition, moral aspects are involved: who is responsible for system failures? Shall the vehicle kill an elderly person or save a young child? Throughout her presentation, Ms. Blessing tried to answer how product managers and software engineers can systematically navigate the moral component of their job. She provided a background on TomTom’s process, touching upon a theoretical angle, research and practice and concluded with practical findings on awareness, copying strategies and expectations, and theoretical findings.

With TISA is concentrating most of its work on the impact that Automated Driving will have on traffic and travel patterns, these three presentations offered a valuable opportunity for Members to gain a wider insight into the matter.

All the presentations are available on TISA Confluence.

TISA is presented at the 14th OADF event

TISA once again contributed the OADF discussion platform in its 14^th edition. During this mixed online and onsite event, which gathered 140 experts, Teun Hendriks, Co-Chair of TISA’s Technical & Standardisation Committee, introduces TISA’s I4 activities, while Martin Pfeifle, CTO at NNG, presented “The Intelligent Co-Driver” which provides visual and voice guidance created from different sources including TPEG.

Mr. Henriks provided an overview of TISA’s latest activities in the domain of Autonomous Driving (AD) and stressed the need for external information related to I4AD, including design principles for an AD-oriented protocol and a three-phase model for providing information to AD vehicles. As reported by Mr. Henriks, TISA is currently considering three initial use cases in this context: precise work zones, the coordination between AD and manually driven vehicles, and emergency vehicles approaching.

Last but not least, OADF participants had the chance to learn more about TISA’s TPEG3 technical aspects and concepts thanks to the Association’s two white papers, available at this link and focusing on the description of TPEG3 and related technical and business requirements.

More information about the topics discussed at the 14th AODF can be found at this link.

Warning messages via navigation devices and Traffic information systems

This article was written by Sylvia Franzen-Brauer, Teun Hendriks und Stefan Schwardt, and was translated into English for TISA’s website. The original article can be found in BBK’s journal.

Since October 2016, the German Federal Office of Civil Protection and Disaster Assistance (BBK), which is 75% co-financed by the German Internal Security Fund, has been working on the socio-technical improvement of the public safety warning system in the country. Among other things, there is a contract to develop new warning channels because, except for traffic reports, no warning messages can be sent to people affected by road traffic. For this important reason, the project included new output devices, identifying in-vehicle navigation devices, among other things, and leading to the testing of a universally applicable solution. The result is a specification developed with international partners, which can be used worldwide for the output of public safety warning messages on end devices in the navigation and traffic information area: TISA SP19006. This specification enables warning disseminators – i.e. manufacturers and operators of navigation and traffic information systems – to transmit appropriate warning messages, worldwide.

Development of the specification

The partner involved in the development of this specification is TISA (Traveller Information Services Association), an international association working in the field of traffic information.TISA provides TPEG specifications and standardized guidelines. TPEG (Transport Protocol Experts Group) specifications are published by ISO in the ISO 21219 series for traffic and travel information. The protocol can be transmitted via different data channels, such as digital radio and cellular communication. The stakeholders active in the development of the current TISA TPEG2-EAW specification involved the Federal Office for Civil Protection and disaster relief (BBK), represented by the ISF project, the company Mecom, Mo-WaS and Teatownlake, in interaction with the TISA task force. The TPEG format can boast of many users, among which Audi, BMW, Mercedes and VW, device manufacturers for navigation devices such as NNG and Garmin, TomTom and HERE, system manufactures and developer GEWI, and radio stations such as NDR and WDR. To process the warning messages TPEG uses standardized items, events and recommendations for actions. Like with a warning message in CAP (Common Alert Protocol) standard, the specification shows how it can be distributed by modular warning systems for the broadcasting to TPEG-enabled terminals.

Functionalities

In addition to the basic functions for transmission, there are also:

• Situation-related and geo-referenced warning messages: TPEG uses the same location referencing system as GPS, which represents de facto a global standard. In this way it is possible to convey situational and georeferenced warning messages.
• Automatically process the data: TPEG offers an independent data transfer format, for which data is processed and can be converted easily. Different channels are used for the transfer, such as digital audio broadcasting (DAB) or mobile Internet. The development of this specification also includes the following activities:

• Harmonization of CAP to issue warning messages on TPEG-capable devices: The German CAP standard was matched with international CAP profiles to harmonize the global output of warning messages on TPEG-enabled devices.
• Multilingual warning messages through standardized and expandable translation tables: The ISF-Project developed a catalogue of hazard descriptions and a list of recommendations for action to enable the translation functionality. A comparison and a completion with the internationally available tables followed, allowing the standardized translation tables to be implemented and issued in multiple languages.
• Guidelines for the users of the specification: The visual design of traffic information in vehicles (safety and operation are a must) and the handling of non-standardized elements were regulated in guidelines.

Further development of TPEG2-EAW 

In the coming year, the TPEG2 EAW user specification for a TPEG EAW service will be tested in a field trial in Germany. In this trial, the complete service supply chain, up to the recipient, will be examined. The results and experiences identified during the trial will be used for refinement and will update the TPEG2-EAW specification. In addition, the knowledge gained will be captured as best practice and compiled in a guideline document.

GEWI improves safety with Real-Time Work Zone Information

TISA Member GEWI has partnered with iCone Products to help travelers avoid and safely navigate road work projects by providing accurate and real-time travel information, which can be delivered directly to navigation devices through apps and in-car navigation systems.​

Using the cloud-based, real-time data from iCone’s ConnectedTech™ devices, GEWI’s TIC Software further enables road agencies and their work zone contractors to manage information about the location and status of work zone assets, this data can in turn can be used to create Traffic and Travel Events which can be distributed to in-vehicle navigation systems, connected apps, and the web.

This data can further be used by transportation agencies to monitor and manage the progress of the work zone to maximize the safety of its work crews. GEWI’s TIC for Work Zone product feature provides a solution to support work zone planning and management throughout the entire life of the project including creating permits, real-time operations, and incident and accident management.

Source: GEWI

TISA guideline for lane numbering is now publicly available

TISA has made publicly available a document that provides a guideline on how TPEG applications can number the lanes of roads. The numbering schema allows TPEG applications to address individual lanes along a road and to have a more fine-granular location description.

The schema is applicable to all applications which are using the road network in a digital map. The map needs to support lane level information and provide at least the number of lanes for road stretches.

The numbering schema was introduced during the development of the TPEG2-VLI specification and is also part of TPEG2-SPI specification.

This guideline was also shared within the Live Map Delivery Chain TF of the OADF to align the lane related information provided by TISA, NDS and ADASIS: Lane ID convention harmonization. Furthermore, a lane reference harmonization exercise was carried out by TPEG and NDS experts of Elektrobit.

Click here to read the guideline.