European Standards in Cooperative ITS for Road Users

According to automotive manufacturers, the mobility of the future will be autonomous, economical and connected, particularly in the road transport sector. Autonomous mobility will ultimately lead us towards the robotization of driving, with two major impacts: the elimination of human-induced driving errors, and their sometimes dramatic consequences, and access to the automobile for new categories of users, such as the elderly or disabled. Not to mention the fact that autonomous mobility brings additional comfort to traditional users, who can enjoy themselves rather than concentrate on their journey. Energy-efficient mobility meets the criteria for optimizing transport energy, thanks to solutions that have a truly significant impact on traffic efficiency, such as multimodal urban transport. Connected mobility integrates our new digital environment into the management of daily road travel. This is the "connected car" that is emerging as part of Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS). Generally speaking, ITS cover all the innovations enabled by new digital technologies in the field of transport, whether road, air, rail or sea. They draw on developments in the fields of computing, electronics, sensors, communications and data management to apply them to the transport sector and improve its use. Among these innovations, Cooperative ITS (C-ITS) introduces direct communication between vehicles (V2V) or between vehicles and road infrastructure (V2I) to improve road safety, traffic management and mobility comfort. This is one of the components of Cooperative, Connected and Automated Mobility (CCAM).

This article begins by presenting the motivation behind ITS-C, its use cases and its standardization environment. Secondly, a technical presentation of the main technologies, at system and component level, is combined with an identification of the standards governing them. This presentation is completed by a description of the validation mechanisms for these technologies and the associated test specifications. Next, another technology, eCall, developed in parallel with ITS-C, is introduced, again in conjunction with the relevant standards. Finally, the article concludes with an overview of the prospects for these systems.