Transport Business

CVIS (Cooperative Vehicle-Infrastructure Systems) is a major pan-European research and development project. The project consortium has designed, developed and tested the cooperative technologies needed to enable vehicles to seamlessly network with roadside infrastructure. Part financed by the European Union’s Sixth Framework Programme, CVIS brings together over 60 European and international partners sharing the vision of revolutionising mobility for travellers and freight through vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communications.
    
The CVIS project started in February 2006, has continued apace since then, notching up a number of significant achievements and milestones, such as its successful demonstration at the ITS World Congress in Stockholm in 2009. It will come to an end in June 2010, but not before its final large scale demonstration at the ‘Cooperative Mobility Showcase 2010: Smart vehicles on intelligent roads’, which will be held in conjunction with InterTraffic, the world’s leading exhibition for infrastructure, traffic management, safety and parking.

One for all
One of the challenges with deploying cooperative systems is that there are many different actors with differing priorities who nonetheless need to work closely together. The list includes public authorities, road operators, freight, logistics and public transport companies, vehicle and equipment manufacturers, software developers and of course the end-users, the consumer.
    
In order for a cooperative system such as CVIS to reach its potential, and to play its role in reducing the number of accidents, the amount of pollution and increasing transport efficiency, and to do all this in real-time, constantly updating the transport information with the latest news on traffic incidents and accidents etc., communication between individual vehicles and roadside units must be seamless, resilient and reliable.
    
To achieve this, the CVIS system equips each vehicle or roadside unit with a universal communication unit. Each one is an equal node in the network, ensuring the reliance of the system as a whole. Both one-way and two-way, individual- and mass- communication is catered for, allowing for a most flexible system.
    
It’s precisely this flexibility that is the real benefit of the CVIS system. The CVIS platform allows third parties to design and deploy applications and services, ones which we as creators of the system cannot yet envisage!
    
This can best be compared to the iPhone phenomena. While Apple was not the first to have an internet ready mobile, its open standard, which allows anybody to create and sell applications, meant that it became the runaway success. While the CVIS platform will not allow you to drink a virtual beer, or tell you where the exits are on London Underground stations, the same principle applies – bottom-up rather than top-down.
    
And this is not just some theory. In the summer of 2009, in order to show how easy it is to create and some day sell innovative applications, the CVIS consortium organised the CVIS Application Contest. Contestants submitted their ideas, developed their applications, and deployed them on the CVIS platform. Four finalists were selected by a CVIS jury comprising of consortium Partners, and were presented at the ITS World Congress in Stockholm.
    
Halmstad University in Sweden took gold with a pedestrian safety system where the vehicle, on detecting unpredictable driver behaviour, informs the intelligent intersection. Both driver and pedestrian are warned. The driver behaviour is compared to reference models implemented using a potential field approach.
    
Lodgon’s silver winning Vehicle Social Networking (VSN) application is a community service where the vehicle interacts with the local environment and the public internet for exchanging personal and location relevant information (whether pot-holes, badly parked cars and the like). The system would also allow for location advertising to be inserted with a relevant context – or even individual recommendations to be made.
    
Ygomi/Connexis took one bronze prize for the evolving vehicle assistant, an info-mobility service where parking lots could be points of interest.
    
Cork Institute of Technologies also took bronze prize. The Commercial Vehicular Agent System (CVAS) is a framework that allows users in a vehicular environment to access location aware trust based services.
    
What’s really exciting is that the two winning applications come from companies not belonging to the CVIS consortium and show the range of applications CVIS is supporting beyond efficiency and support of mobility. The CVIS concept can be extended to safety and infotainment applications, which can be of real interest to the consumer. Indeed, LodgON, thanks to the great success and positive feedback at the Stockholm Congress, has launched the official version, called ‘DaliReporter’.
 
Last, best chance
The CVIS project is drawing to a close, but you still have a chance to see CVIS in action. The ‘Cooperative Mobility Showcase 2010: smart vehicles on intelligent roads’ is a world-class showcase of innovative V2V and V2I technologies held in and around Amsterdam RAI from 23 to 26 March. The CVIS project will present its final results, in association with two related EU part-financed projects, SAFESPOT AND COOPERS, with whom it will share a stand as part of the i&c Drive exhibition. i&cDRIVE is a new brand within Intertraffic, dedicated in 2010 to cooperative systems.
    
A wide range of cooperative mobility applications will be demonstrated on the public highways leading to Schiphol Airport, on the airport’s own road network and on a dedicated safety demonstration area. In addition, a fully operational “cooperative traffic centre of the future” will be set up to visualise the demonstrations going on outdoors and to show the migration from existing systems to future applications.
    
The cooperative traffic centre will be the nerve centre of the demonstrations and meeting place for the showcase event as a whole. Every hour there will be a 30-minute presentation with two actors, introducing the idea of cooperative systems, the traffic management operator’s perspective, the driver’s perspective, and the traffic management centre of the future.
    
The permanent display/visualisation will use a videowall, displaying different views of the traffic situation, such as a map based online traffic state, the position and estimated time of arrival of the tour busses together with current speed limits and VMS information, other dynamic presentations of cooperative applications and a live video stream to the safety demonstration site.

Easy rider
The Public Road Tour will be operational for four days during the Intertraffic conference. Here, delegates will learn about the benefits of cooperate systems in terms of efficiency, safety and environment, and see these systems in action. A fleet of 10 mini vans will drive a dedicated route between the RAI in Amsterdam and Schiphol airport (45 minutes), making this a truly exciting demonstration of the CVIS project, a real new driving experience.
    
One of the key CVIS points is the seamless handover between differing communication channels used for cooperative systems. The system easily switches between infrared (short range), M5 (medium range, dedicated for ITS use) and 3G (wireless internet) communication media, depending on the specific application’s need. The Public Road Tour will demonstrate this in real life conditions.
    
Many cooperative applications will be demonstrated: enhanced positioning, multimodal traffic, dynamic parking, and many more.
    
But what do these applications actually do? Well, enhanced positioning means accurate, real time details of the vehicle’s position, creating opportunities for road efficiency, e.g. dynamic hard shoulder use or flexible use of a bus lane. The demonstration shows the car matched to the lane you are actually driving in Amsterdam at A10Z to A4 to A9.
    
The open nature of the CVIS platform enables smooth and easy automatic downloading of applications. New services add dynamically to the car platform during the ride. The Amsterdam demonstration will include a road side unit announcement for several applications (e.g. entering a green zone).
    
Speaking of green zones… another application will demonstrate this sustainable mobility concept. Access control can help avoid dangerous goods entering specific city areas, or vehicles travelling through/on inappropriate tunnels or bridges. The vehicle receives an announcement when it approaches the controlled area (the city of Amsterdam for example). Specific rules get downloaded which are valid to the actual local situation, e.g. a truck-free zone. When entering the sensitive area, the rules are applied and matched with the specific vehicle’s information to allow or deny access. If no access is allowed navigation recommendations are provided that avoid the area and guarantee a smooth continuation of the journey.
    
Dynamic parking is where information on the available parking space, in this case around Schiphol airport, will be displayed in the vehicle. The parking zone application will match the vehicle to the space!
    
Finally, to increase the efficiency of city transport, the multimodal traffic application offers the choice to park vehicles at a public transport station and enter the city by train, bus or tram. The actual schedule is sent to the car by the road side unit in the station. The actual timetable presents itself dynamically to the driver generating personalised advice, based on pre-defined and programmable options, allowing the traveller to decide on how best to use the application.
    
We very much hope you can join us not just at the Cooperative Mobility Showcase 2010, but also in the CVIS dream!