European Space Agency
European Space Agency
Road safety is one of the major concerns in every country. The European Commission has been taking several actions and plans to reduce road accident casualties. As an example, the European Road Safety Charter defined 10 principles where this project RISING fits completely:
The project "RISING - Road Information System for Next-Generation Cars" aims to contribute to the increase of road safety by providing localized and real-time Traffic and Travel Information to vehicle drivers.
The project goal is to develop and demonstrate a non-proprietary system and language-independent platform for aggregating, provisioning, distribution and delivery of Traffic and Travel Information (TTI) content to vehicle drivers.
The Figure bellow presents an overview of the RISING System.
The RISING system automatically collects TTI content from external content providers such as road operators and monitoring systems. The TTI Content is provisioned into the system and then it is broadcasted through a satellite communication to the hotspots installed along the road. The hotspots uses a Wi-Fi network to send the TTI content as TPEG streams to the in-vehicle Pocket PC device running a TTI Client software application.
The RISING project aims to give a valuable contribution to the area of automotive telematics by using satellite communication integrated with Wi-Fi technology as well as the TPEG protocol supported by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU).
The key issues to be addressed in the project are:
European Union is facing an explosion in road traffic which brings consequences such as saturation of industrialized urban regions, environment pollution and unsafe roads due to the augmented traffic congestion.
The increasing numbers in road traffic brings some unpleasant consequences. In 2000, road accidents killed over 40 thousands people in the European Union and injured more than 1.7 million. Transport by road is the most dangerous and the most costly in terms of human lives.
During the next 10 years, the European Union intends to pursue the ambitious goal of reducing the number of deaths on the roads by half with integrated actions taking account of human and technical factors designed to make the trans-European road network a safer network.
The main benefit of the RISING solution is to provide a technology platform that exploits the convergence of wireless and satellite communication to help the broadcast of localized, relevant and time-sensitive traffic information to the vehicle drivers with the main goal of increasing the safety in the roads and highways and reducing the numbers in car accidents.
The RISING system is divided in three subsystems:
The Figure below illustrates the RISING system architecture.
The RISING system relies on open standards such as TPEG and Wi-FI. TPEG is a promising standard for traffic information systems and Wi-Fi is being adopted by the automotive industry namely automakers.
In summary, a network of RISING Hotspots is installed on the road. The Hotspots receive traffic information from the CMS subsystem over a DVB-S link and deliver it to the vehicles using an 802.11b network. The TPEG protocol is used to transport the traffic information to the vehicles.
The project started on January 2005 and it has three main phases as follows:
During the project execution two other work-packages are undertaken:
Three meetings are scheduled to take place in the end of each phase:
The pilot activities will take place on a Portuguese motorway under the concession of the Brisa partner.
Phase 1 was completed and the Baseline Design Review meeting took place in mid June 2005.
Regarding Phase 2 of the project the following goals were achieved:
The Mid-Term Review meeting took place in mid November 2007 where the following were successfully demonstrated:
A car moving along the RISING hotspots received all traffic information on a PDA device running the RISING TTI Client software. Phase 2 was successfully concluded.
Phase 3 of the project is a 2.5 month field trial on Brisa's motorway starting February 2008. Four hotspots will be installed and commissioned using satellite and GSM communications. The TTI Client software will be provided to a group of users that will be using the system on a daily basis. Relevant feedback will be obtained from pilot users and system performance.
WIT-Software and the RISING team would like to thank the remarkable support that ESA User Support Office, ESA/ESTEC, ESA/ESRIN and the Austrian company GCS (Global Communication Systems) has provided us for the commissioning of RISING test sites using satellite communications.
