The European Commission (EC) and U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) have agreed to cooperate on the harmonisation of connected and cooperative vehicle architectures, which will allow for seamless and cross-border smart mobility services.
The two parties brokered the deal, known as a “twinning agreement”, during the ITS World Congress in Montreal. It was signed by representatives Marcos Pillado, Project Coordinator of the EU co-funded project C-MobILE and responsible for connected vehicles at Applus+ IDIADA, and Cliff Heise, project manager of ITS architecture evolution and Vice President of US Federal and Research at Iteris.
The agreement gives the project teams a clear, shared understanding on the terms of the cooperation, the objectives and outputs to be pursued, and the nature of the teams’ plans for engagement and interaction.
In Europe, the C-MobILE project is using state-of-the-art communication, road-side architecture, and service delivery technologies and concepts to develop a reference architecture which is both open and secure, and will allow for a range of interoperable cooperative intelligent transport services to be deployed. Meanwhile, the US National ITS Architecture Program is working, in conjunction with ITS standards and international architecture and standards cooperation programmes, on an efficient, interoperable, secure and cost-effective intelligent transport service infrastructure, and supporting automated vehicle deployments across North America.
While providing greater access to expertise across the Atlantic, the main aim of this agreement is to achieve an improved and harmonised reference architecture which can become the basis for the development of customised yet interoperable intelligent transport service deployments.
