Cooperative ITS

Cooperative ITS for Safe and Sustainable Transportation

Overview

System diagram of Cooperative ITS services

ITS can be defined as “Systems constructed using state-of-the-art ICT to integrate people, roads (infrastructure) and vehicles, in order to resolve a variety of transportation challenges such as traffic safety, smooth transit, environmental consciousness and comfort”, before 1990s. Afterwards, technical and social backdrop has drastically changed, where advanced ICT become common and enabled personal devices to send/receive large data, and it become necessary to consider overall transportation including various modes to move people and goods from place to place. Based on these situations today, ITS can be re-defined with the following concept:

An innovation on technology, social, and economic institution for improving safe, secure, and smooth transit under the environment in which information is closely shared each other through communication.
A system in which information on various people, goods, mobile systems, infrastructure and so on, in various situations subject to certain restrictions, is gathered for sharing and use, resulting in cooperation among them.

We named this re-defined ITS as “Cooperative ITS” especially, and issued a proposal on it from perspective of academia, for the functions and performance that should be provided by infrastructure, for the planning, design methodology, operational technologies, and social norms and systems, taking into consideration a future with drastic changes in the performance and functions of transportation modes.

In this proposal, based on the social background, a picture of the achievement of ITS in the future and directions for future ITS development is presented, and some cross-cutting issues are also discussed. Public transportation and automated driving are taken up as examples to study the issues that must be resolved for mid-/long-term promotion of ITS, through consideration on technical elements and image of realization.

We expect this proposal helps R&D and practical installation for research institutes, private sectors, and governments related to ITS in common viewpoints, and share issues to be considered for future direction and image of ITS.

October 2016
Advanced Mobility Research Center (ITS Center),
Institute of Industrial Science, The University of Tokyo