The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO), which believe it is critical to easing traffic bottlenecks, have partnered to form a joint task force for intelligent transport systems (ITS) communications.
Poor communication between overlapping sectors and automotive, ITS players, telecoms suppliers and operators has resulted in the involvement of these international standards bodies.
The initiative aims to engineer better collaboration between these sectors and pool resources and linking existing work and avoiding duplication, the ITU says. “This comes after transport industry experts agree that the next 20 years will see a huge shift towards ITS.”
According to the ITU, today's communications capabilities give the potential for vehicles to foresee and avoid collisions, navigate the quickest route to their destination, make use of up-to-the-minute traffic reports, identify the nearest available parking slot, minimise their carbon emissions and provide multimedia communications.
“But while considerable resources have been invested in R&D, the lack of global standards is widely regarded as a major impediment to large scale deployment of ITS services and applications,” it says.
Secretary-general of ITU, Hamadoun Tour'e, says there is a will from manufacturers to implement these technologies, “but as yet there has been no real breakthrough in terms of the technical standards needed to roll this out on a global scale.”
He says vehicle manufacturers do not want to create different versions of this technology for every different market. “They do not want regional or national standards. They want global standards, and through this initiative ITU and ISO are proving that we are willing and able to provide them.”
Secretary-general of ISO, Rob Steele, agrees with Tour'e, saying there is a need for harmonisation of standardisation of essential technologies to provide a solid base for further innovation and the economies of scale for commercialisation of technologies.
“Most interestingly of all, is the urgent need to consider the interoperability of all of this technology not only in the vehicle, but in the wider infrastructure that is needed to support this revolution,” he says.
Steele says the value of the solutions proposed is magnified when they are globally relevant. “In this, customers of international standards care most about the benefits that implementing international standards provide.”
The industry should not and will not wait while standards organisations fight among themselves, compete or try to decide who will develop that standard, he says. “They want to be listened to and have their needs for international standard solutions met."
ITU and ISO welcome participation in the joint task force for ITS communications by the national and regional standards bodies working in ITS and communications.
These organisations have a long history of work in ITS, and have maintained long-standing cooperation on the creation of standards in the field. The new agreement cements this relationship, allowing for greater coordination of their work programmes and harmonisation of all outputs.
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