EU Projects on C-ITS

Besides the politically driven standardization activities various projects on C-ITS signifi-cantly contributed to the success story of C-ITS. The European Commission financially supported a large number of ideas around C-ITS through funding in various framework programs. The projects were developing the technology, proofed the technical feasibi-lity and addressed various issues. But not only technical challenges were solved, some

had economic or legal aspects in focus, others mainly realized large-scale field operational tests to collect huge amounts of close to reality data and results. Some of the largest C-ITS projects in the past decades were:

• CVIS, COOPERS and SAFESPOT, three parallel implementation projects with focus on technology and proof of concept

• DriveC2X, bringing together a large number of national C-ITS activities, just recently closed successfully

• Coordination and support actions that made big contributions to standardization and dissemination of other projects’ results: COMeSafety, COMeSafety2, CODECS A summary and description of the mentioned projects as well as a list with additional C-ITS projects and field operational tests in Europe is available in the FOT-net Wiki [2011, Pages in category ’Cooperative Systems’]

Most of the European projects had a work package dealing with project related architecture aspects and developed a project specific architecture. Though most of the projects consid-ered architecture to be a necessary negligibility but actually focused on C-ITS technology or other C-ITS related aspects. The only project with a focus on architecture was FRAME (its predecessor KAREN) and the C-ITS successor eFrame.

The following sections provide some more information on prominent C-ITS projects con-sidered in the approach of this thesis.

2.2.6.3.1. CVIS – Cooperative Vehicle-Infrastructure Systems

CVIS was one of the three large C-ITS projects in the 6th Framework Program running from 2006 to 2010. The project significantly contributed to the advancement of the C-ITS technology and analyzed various non-technical aspects like user acceptance, privacy, se-curity and economical aspects. Part of the project were several test sites across Europe.

CVIS developed its own project architecture and was involved in the harmonization activ-ities driven by COMeSafety.

Information and core documents are available from the Transport Research and Informa-tion Portal as the project website was closed down in the meantime [CVIS, n.d.].

2.2.6.3.2. COOPERS – Co-operative Networks for Intelligent Road Safety

COOPERS was like CVIS one of the three large C-ITS projects in the 6th Framework Pro-gram running as well from 2006 to 2010. Its objective was the C-ITS technology with a strong focus on safety related V2I (vehicle2infrastructure) services. The technical develop-ments were tested at several European test sites in field operational tests.

COOPERS developed its own project architecture and contributed to the harmonization activities of COMeSafety.

Information and core documents are available from the Transport Research and Informa-tion Portal as the project website was closed down in the meantime [COOPERS, n.d.].

2.2.6.3.3. Safespot – Cooperative Systems for Road Safety

Safespot was the third of the three large C-ITS projects in the 6th Framework Program running from 2006 to 2010. Like the other two, CVIS and COOPERS, Safespot worked as well on the technical advancements of C-ITS which were demonstrated at several Euro-pean test sites. The other targets of Safespot were non-technical aspects like organizational structures, business models and cost-benefit analysis.

Like the other two C-ITS projects Safespot developed its own project architecture and was involved in COMeSafety activities.

Information and core documents are available from the project website [Safespot, n.d.a]

and the Transport Research and Information Portal [Safespot, n.d.b].

2.2.6.3.4. Drive C2X – DRIVing implementation and Evaluation of Car2X (C2X) commu-nication technology in Europe

The project Drive C2X is the successor of the project Pre-Drive (2008-2010) and was funded in the 7th Framework Program running from 2011 to 2013. When Drive C2X started the C-ITS technology already achieved a comparatively mature level so the focus of Drive C2X was rather on the assessment of technology than on its advancement. Therefore, selected services were implemented and intensively tested on several European test sites, one of the main objectives was to do this in parallel in a harmonized and aligned environment to obtain comparable results under different conditions. Several national field operational tests participated in Drive C2X, e.g. simTD (Germany), DITCM (Netherlands), Score@F (France). Besides the technical aspects Drive C2X worked on business models and different crucial deployment factors of C-ITS.

Information and core documents are available from the project website [Drive C2X, n.d.a]

and the Transport Research and Information Portal [Drive C2X, n.d.b].

2.2.6.3.5. COMeSafety – Communications for eSafety; COMeSafety2; CODECS

COMeSafety was a Coordination and Support Action in the 6th Framework Program of the European Commission running from 2006 to 2009. COMESafety supported the parallel running integrated projects CVIS, SafeSpot and COOPERS by working towards interop-erable solutions. Therefore, COMeSafety developed a common European ITS communi-cation architecture and thereby set the ground for interoperable systems. The architecture was standardized in CEN / ISO and ETSI. Apart from that COMeSafety was pushing the frequency allocation in the 5.9 GHz band.

Successors of COMeSafety are the projects COMeSafety2 (2011-2013, 7th Framework Pro-gram) and CODECS (2015-2018, Horizon2020). COMeSafety2 continued to contribute to standardization, international harmonization and supported the deployment discussions and activities in C-ITS. The CODECS project, which started recently, continued the harmo-nization activities, plays a major role in the joint deployment and will work on European standards’ profiles for C-ITS [CODECS, n.d.].

2.2.6.3.6. FRAME (Framework Architecture Made for Europe) and eFrame (Extended Framework architecture for cooperative systems)

The development of a European ITS Framework architecture originally started with the project KAREN (1998-2000) and was later continued as FRAME project ([FRAME-NET, n.d.], [FRAME-S, n.d.], all funded by the European Commission). FRAME (FRAME-NET, FRAME-S) was running from 2001 to 2003 and maintained and advanced the architecture originally developed in KAREN. This incorporated as well the development of specific tools that should help users and stakeholders to customize their own architecture based on the generic European ITS Framework architecture.

Successor of FRAME was eFRAME (2008-2011), the C-ITS advancement of the FRAME project. eFRAME closely cooperated with the projects COOPERS, CVIS and Safespot. The three C-ITS technology focused projects provided the requirements (user needs) for the cooperative FRAME extensions. eFRAME provided an updated version of the FRAME tools and thereby showed that the transition of the FRAME results to C-ITS is possible.

Details on KAREN, FRAME and eFrame are available online [Frame, n.d.a].