European project C-Mobile and representatives of the US Department of Transport (US DOT) came together to compare and harmonize their Cooperative Intelligent Transport Systems (C-ITS) architectures. The workshop took place the 14 th and 15th February in the RACC premises in Barcelona, and has shown the growing need to ensure interoperability between the European and US C-ITS architectures.

The two days’ workshop allowed C-ITS authorities and stakeholders to join efforts to explain and compare US and European C-ITS architectures and to identify similarities between both. The long term objective is to ensure their interoperability.

On one side, the US delegation was represented by Mr. Steve Still, Acting Team Leader of the Federal Highway Administration of the US DOT, and Mr. Tom Lusco from the company Iteris. Iteris provides consulting services to the US DOT on Connected and Automated Driving.

Across the table, the C-MobILE team was led by Marcos Pillado (project coordinator from Applus+ IDIADA) and Manuel Fünfrocken (Hochschule Für Technik und Wirtschaft des Saarlandes), and featured representatives from CERTH (Centre for Research & Technology Hellas), ERTICO, MAP Traffic Management B.V. and Eindhoven University of Technology assisted.

During the workshop it was pointed out that many components and concepts identified in the US C-ITS Architecture could almost be translated word-for-word into the European reference architecture. It was noted that the conceptual architectures are identical, with their structure and methodology based on the standard ISO/IEC/IEEE 42010. As a result, US Services can be simply carried over into a European Equivalent at up to 95%.

A key aspect of the C-Mobile project is to address the large-scale deployment of mobility services in eight European cities. As such, the project is integrating C-ITS architecture components developed and identified by several European organizations and projects into the European reference architecture. For this reason, special attention was also focused on the architecture components necessary to deliver these services. In this case, the US C-ITS expertise and experience was widely appreciated and contributed to a better definition of the different services due to be deployed in the deployment cities.

US DOT’s Steve Sill and Iteris’ Tom Lusco then introduced the American C-ITS infrastructure. This architecture, known as the Architecture Reference for Cooperative and Intelligent Transportation (ARC-IT) version 8.1 is following the guidelines published by the American National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Its approach is similar to the European one, but describes the architecture through only four viewpoints: The Enterprise, Functional, Physical and Communications view. Next to the actual architectures definition, two ARC-IT companion tools are currently developed: RAD-IT and SET-IT. These tools allow project architects to extract from the overall ARC-IT architecture to regional and service specific architectures. The tools are free of charge and can be downloaded from the ARC-IT website (https://local.iteris.com/arc-it/index.html).

This workshop was organised in the framework of the Twinning Agreement signed in November 2017 between IDIADA and ITERIS. This agreement seeks to achieve an improved and harmonised reference architecture that can become the basis for the development of customised yet interoperable intelligent transport service deployments.

C-MobILE (Accelerating C-ITS Mobility Innovation and depLoyment in Europe) is deploying C-ITS services designed to deal with specific mobility challenges across Europe. The project also aims to help local authorities deploy the C-ITS services they need and to raise awareness of the potential benefits for all road users. This project is co-funded by the European Union under the Horizon 2020 (H2020) Research and Innovation Programme (grant agreement No 723311).

For more details about the C-Mobile project please visit: http://c-mobile-project.eu/