Jennifer Symoun
Good afternoon or good morning to those of you to the West. Welcome to the Talking Freight Seminar Series. My name is Jennifer Symoun and I will moderate today's seminar. Today's topic is IntelliDriveSM Program Impacts on Highway Freight. Please be advised that today's seminar is being recorded.
Today we'll have four presenters, all from the United States Department of Transportation. We have Kate Hartman of the Intelligent Transportation Systems Joint Program Office, Alrik Svenson of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Cem Hatipoglu of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, and Chris Flanigan of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration.
Kate Hartman is with the ITS Joint Program Office in the Research and Innovative Technology Administration of the US DOT. Kate has worked on projects affecting trucks and freight for almost 15 years, including research and field testing of a variety of safety and mobility technologies. Kate currently serves as the Program Manager for the Dynamic Mobility Applications Program.
Alrik Svenson is a Research Engineer and Program Manager in the Office of Applied Vehicle Safety Research at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). Mr. Svenson manages research programs in support of agency rulemaking initiatives in the areas of crash avoidance and tires for both passenger vehicles and heavy trucks. This includes projects in vehicle safety communications, braking, stability control, and collision mitigation systems.
Dr. Cem Hatipoglu is with Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration's Office of Analysis, Research and Technology since September 2010. He currently leads the Technology Transfer program for on-board safety systems and co-represents FMCSA in multi-modal research on wireless connectivity. Prior to joining DOT, Dr. Hatipoglu worked in the heavy-duty trucking industry for over a decade researching and developing numerous on-board safety systems in a technical leadership capacity.
Chris Flanigan has been an engineer with the Department of Transportation for 22 years. He has been with the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) since March 2004. While at FMCSA, he has overseen commercial vehicle projects that focus on driver safety as well as projects that seek to assess the value of crash avoidance technologies such as forward collision, lane change, run-off-road warning systems. Currently, in partnership with the Federal Highway Administration, he is leading the Smart Roadside Initiative. This effort is aimed at developing and testing roadside enforcement technologies that enhance and streamline the inspection process.
Today's seminar will last 90 minutes, with 60 minutes allocated for the speakers, and the final 30 minutes for audience Question and Answer. If during the presentations you think of a question, you can type it into the chat area. Please make sure you send your question to "Everyone" and indicate which presenter your question is for. Presenters will be unable to answer your questions during their presentations, but I will start off the question and answer session with the questions typed into the chat box. Once we get through all of the questions that have been typed in, the Operator will give you instructions on how to ask a question over the phone. If you think of a question after the seminar, you can send it to the presenters directly, or I encourage you to use the Freight Planning LISTSERV. If you have not already joined the LISTSERV, the web address at which you can register is provided on the slide on your screen.
Finally, I would like to remind you that this session is being recorded. A file containing the audio and the visual portion of this seminar will be posted to the Talking Freight Web site within the next week. We encourage you to direct others in your office that may have not been able to attend this seminar to access the recorded seminar.
The PowerPoint presentations used during the seminar are available for download from the file download box in the lower right corner of your screen. The presentations will also be available online within the next week. I will notify all attendees of the availability of the PowerPoints, the recording, and a transcript of this seminar.
One final note: Talking Freight seminars are eligible for 1.5 certification maintenance credits for AICP members. In order to obtain credit for today's seminar, you must have logged in with your first and last name or if you are attending with a group of people you must type your first and last name into the chat box. I have included more detailed instructions in the file share box on how to obtain your credits after the seminar. Please note that today's seminar is not yet available on the AICP web site. I will send out an email to everyone who registered once it is available for credits. Please also download the evaluation form from the file share box and submit this form to me after you have filled it out.
We're now going to go ahead and get started. Today's topic, for those of you who just joined us, is IntelliDriveSM Program Impacts on Highway Freight. Our first presenter is Kate Hartman of the Intelligent Transportation Systems Joint Program Office. As a reminder, if you have questions during the presentation please type them into the chat box and they will be answered in the last 30 minutes of the seminar.
Kate Hartman
Thank you Jennifer. Good afternoon, good morning to those on the line. As Jennifer said, I'm with the ITS Joint Program Office among other things I have been coordinating a variety of truck programs as well as the being the program manager of the Dynamic Ability Applications Program. Today I'm going to try and give a more overarching program view of what is going on in the ITS Joint Program Office. This is also a preview of the slides used in the TRB so you are the preview audience to get some feedback from.
The title my presentation is ITS Program Update Moving Towards Implementation of Wireless Connectivity in Surface Transportation. The program that our office is currently implementing was based on the strategic research plan that was published last year that had a vision for truly multimodal and connected transportation system. The system is envisioned to feature connected transportation environment around vehicles of all types, the infrastructure, and the portable devices that would serve the public good by leveraging technology to maximize safety, mobility, and environmental performance. The strategic plan was developed with full participation by a variety of surface transportation modal administrations as well as with significant interaction with multimodal stakeholders. This was held through a variety of workshops and meetings throughout the year and I'm sure many of you have participated. The publications itself is on our electronic document library and if you have not seen it and are interested let me know and we can get your copy.
This is a graphic representation of the multimodal and connected nature of the work that we are doing. Cars, trucks, buses, transit vehicles, traveler information, wireless devices, and the highway itself are fair game in our program.
This is a more system engineering "techie" version of what we are doing. As you can see at the top row the safety, mobility, and environment in the kind of orange-peach color are the three main areas that the ITS programs focuses on with the emphasis being on safety. Under pinning the safety, mobility, and environment applications are the technology and policy work that is going on to support those three areas. In the safety area, the biggest chunk of the focus of the program is on the V2V safety with the V2I and the Safety Pilot Program also supporting the safety application. Within the mobility program, there are two separate sections. One is called the Real-Time Data Capture and Management Program and the other is called Dynamic Mobility Applications Program. Within the environment portion of the program are the AERIS and the Road Weather Application section. I'll be getting into little more detail with the following slides on these. As I have said, there are a number of technologies and policies under pinning to the program that we are doing.
The initial step one within be connected vehicle program is the acceleration of vehicle-to-vehicle safety. The focus here is really on cars, but trucks that carry freight are very much a part of this program. The acceleration of the V2V safety is developing a core set of applications conducting benefit assessment doing work on driver vehicle interface guidelines as well as trying to globally harmonized standards. The acceleration of the V2V DSRC short range communication devices with the basic safety message and aftermarket safety devices is also going on. This is all in supportive of the 2013 regulatory decisions focused on cars but there is an assumption that there will be a similar regulatory decision shortly after focused on commercial vehicles. Again, the following presenters will provide some detail of this work as it relates to heavy vehicles.
Step two in the program is demonstrating the safety applications. This is going to be done through something we call a Safety Pilot. The Safety Pilot will be a major road tested real-world implementation taking place shortly. As a matter of a fact, there should be a procurement out in a few weeks on the Safety Pilot. The Safety Pilot will involve multiple vehicle types meaning cars, trucks, and transit buses. It will fully integrate systems and aftermarket devices. Also the Safety Pilot is going to do some prototype security mechanisms testing and some certification processes.
The Safety Pilot goals are to support real-world V2V and V2I applications with a data rich environment, establish benefits in support of the 2013 NHTSA regulatory decision, and also to create a public awareness to determine user acceptance. There is a plan to have some demonstrations at the ITS World Congress in Orlando in October. The outcomes from the Safety Pilot are expected to be benefits and user acceptance data from supporting future federal actions, archive road network data for supporting mobility, environmental, and other industry research and multiple suppliers sources for devices and infrastructure (qualified products list for Here I Am, Roadside Equipment, and Aftermarket safety devices) as well as getting a better understanding of the operational policy associated with the deployment of the V2V and V2I applications.
Step three in the program is to define a system and establish a test environment and this is already underway. There is been work developing user needs and a number of workshops have been held within the last six months or so. Currently, they are in a state of defining a concept of operations system requirements and the architecture. In addition, there have been some test bed activities building on your regional VII Michigan test bed that is in various stages of operation. There will be more and these will be supported and integrated with the overall safety and mobility program as they move forward.
Step four gets into more the mobility and the environment applications and includes the V to I for safety which is an attempt to accelerate signal phase and timing-based applications. Includes Smart Roadsides, which should be particularly interesting to this audience and I believe that Chris will talk to that later, as well as including transit. The prototype data environment of the future which will be collecting data from all vehicles by using all vehicles as probes as well as prototyping field testing and analyzing various mobility applications. This is going to be done using open source software to accelerate the deployment. A lot of this initial research has been going on through the fall. We did a number of workshops and stakeholder inputs sessions and they are whittling down the final selection of these applications, but some of the finalists include the signal systems, transit management, freight focused applications, R.E.S.C.U.E.M.E. which is a safety public safety oriented application, advanced traveler information, and the speed harmonization application.
Step five is to build a reference implementation that reflects the system architecture, utilizes harmonized international standards, implements a certification process, implements a governance process, and implement a security process. Again I think to go back to the original slide with the safety mobility and the environment, you can see these.
Further out within a few years after the Safety Pilot has started, there is the intention to conduct regional pilots which will be done with multiple implementation areas and a variety of applications coordinated with the implementation areas needs. It will also help the seed implementation as well is using the lesson learned from the Safety Pilot continue to build the architecture and accelerate the DSRC for safety as well as leveraging available wireless communication for mobility and environmental applications. We also hope to leverage activity that is going on with the private sector today.
This is the roadmap. It is busy, but it's actually a fairly good picture that lists variety of activities that we have going on with a timeline and you can see how activities start developing and then come together with the focus on the Safety Pilot and then moving on to other regional pilots, but with the various other pieces of the program supporting and coordinating in those efforts.
That is a very high level, very quick overview of some technical work that is going on. I am going to now turn it over to Jennifer to moderate the rest of the session.
Jennifer Symoun
Thank you Kate. As I mentioned, when you think of questions please type them into the chat area and indicate who your question is for. We are now going to move onto the next presenter Alrik Svenson of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
Alrik Svenson
Thank you Jennifer, I am going to be talking today about the Vehicle Safety Communications Commercial V2V Research Program. This is a major initiative not only within DOT but the within the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to improve safety.
This is a brief outline of my presentation today. I will define what we mean by a vehicle safety communication, I will go over some of the applications in the various crash types that these systems can address, I will give you an overview of the crash problem, I will go over the vehicle to vehicle or V2V communications research plan, and then I will talk specifically about commercial vehicles V2V research that we are doing and the plan that we have for that. Finally, I will briefly go over the next steps.
I would now like to talk about vehicle safety communications in terms of a connected vehicle environment and Kate in her presentation gave us a very good introduction of what DOT is envisioning which is a multi-environment were passenger cars, heavy cars, and rail will all be connected through the use of a wireless communication. The dynamic exchange of data between vehicles and infrastructure and vehicles and mobile devices will support a variety of applications that will dramatically improve safety, mobility, and has environmental benefits as well. These applications are being designed to address real-world problems and can provide benefits by reducing the number of severity crashes, reduce the traffic congestion, save fuel, and cut CO2 emissions.
Vehicle safety communications include applications that can greatly improve safety and that are designed to increase the driver situational awareness and this is to reduce or eliminate crashes. So this includes when we're talking about vehicle safety communications, everything under the vehicle to vehicle (V2V) and the vehicle to infrastructure communications (V2I). So in these systems, your vehicle informs you of roadway conditions and hazards you cannot see. Your vehicle knows the speed and location of approaching vehicles and using this information the system can then provide drivers a warning, or in the next implementation of the system take action by controlling the vehicle to keep it out of harm's way. Also it is estimated that vehicle safety communications can potentially address up to 82% of crash scenarios were for all vehicles for unimpaired drivers.
This chart shows the major crash types for all vehicles and various safety applications that match each type. There are many crash systems on new vehicles currently on the market, either in production or under development that can help reduce the crashes. Some examples of these are: blind spot detection, side radar, forward crash warning, and lane departure warning. Each of these systems requires specific equipment such as sensors, radar, or cameras to operate. With vehicle safety communications V2V or V2I systems, much of the needed information to run safety applications is obtained wirelessly from surrounding vehicles and infrastructure. Many of the expensive vehicle sensors used in current systems are no longer needed to provide the same benefits. In many ways, V2V and V2I can perform these functions better and can address the limitations of the systems that we are currently seeing.
As we saw in the previous slide, vehicle safety communications have the potential to address a significant portion of the crash problem. We had an analysis done by the Volpe Center of crash data using 2005 to 2008 the General Estimate System (GES) data and their findings indicate that approximately 82% of crashes for all vehicle types could be addressed by vehicle safety communications.
This chart shows the distribution of heavy vehicle crashes from the GES. The point I'm trying to make here is that heavy vehicle crash problem is predominantly for unimpaired drivers and therefore it is very addressable by vehicle safety communications. By that I mean both the V2V and V2I. This is in contrast to the light vehicle crash problem which has about 10% as opposed to about 2% of either drug or alcohol impairment and drowsy drive related crashes.
Of the addressable heavy vehicle crashes, approximately 71% could be addressed by V2V and V2I together as the primary countermeasure. If we look at V2V alone, 70% of the crashes could be addressed. For autonomous or standalone crash avoidance systems, here the denoted by ‘AV' on the chart, these systems could address 64% of the crashes and V2I alone has the potential to address 14% of the crashes. One thing I would like point out now is that on this chart, the bars in the graph are not additive. Each one represents the proportion of addressable crashes if that system or systems together whether primary countermeasure.
This table lists the top crash scenario types that are addressable by V2V or V2I for commercial vehicles. The first column lists the total yearly average of crashes. The second column is what proportion is addressable by V2V and V2I together. The third column is for autonomous vehicle systems. You can see that V2V and V2I together can address most of the top crash scenarios however you still have to remember in this chart just like the previous one of showing you, the numbers in the table are assuming V2V in V2I are the primary countermeasures so standalone autonomous systems can potentially address these other scenarios as well if they were considered the primary countermeasure. Basically what we're looking at is if we only had V2V and V2I, what the proportion of countermeasures can be addressed.
In order to realize the vision of the V2V, where the vehicles can communicate with other vehicles and use that information to support a new generation of safety applications, we have developed a V2V safety research plan. The purpose of the plan is to accelerate the implementation of the next generation of safety improvements through the widespread deployment of V2V. This includes all types of vehicles: passenger cars, trucks, transit, and fleet vehicles. Some of the objectives of the plan are to conduct the necessary research and resolve the technical issues needed to support the NHTSA regulatory decisions that are coming out. We have a 2013 decision on light vehicles and we recently announced a 2014 decision for heavy vehicles. Also we want to accelerate the development of this technology to ensure that there is a value to the first vehicles on the road with V2V. To achieve the maximum safety benefit, we need to have all of the vehicles equipped with the technology. However, before that happens we try to find a way to provide better benefits to the early adopters of V2V.
This is the V2V safety application research plan road map over a five year timeline. I know there's a lot of information on the slide and the slides are going to be available for download after this presentation. So I would invite you to take a closer look at this later. There are couple things I want to point out here. This program aims to develop dedicated short range communication (DSRC) based safety applications for the most critical crash scenarios. We will be conducting testing and estimating safety benefit of V2V to support the NHTSA regulatory decisions. We are doing research on human factors and the driver-vehicle interface to seek ways to minimize driver distraction. We have developed a separate research plan to address specific issues related to heavy trucks which I'm going to talk about just a minute and also for transit vehicles. We are also considering other issues related to other parts of this program such as retrofit and aftermarket devices, policy issues, privacy of data, and security issues.
We developed the commercial vehicle V2V research plan with the objective to resolve the commercial vehicle specific technical and policy issues necessary for deployment of V2V systems and some of the key tasks of this plan are: to identify priority commercial vehicle crash scenarios, and we saw earlier some of those results, select priory safety applications and determining performance requirements for V2V systems, identify the commercial vehicle specific interoperability issues. V2V requires that all vehicles that communicate with each other regardless of make, model or type of vehicle. We are already doing a lot of work on this from the light duty vehicle side; our plan from the commercial vehicle side is to explore this from the heavy vehicle perspective. We're identifying the commercial vehicle specific human factors, and driver-vehicle interface issues. The cab of a heavy vehicle is much different than that of a passenger vehicle in terms of layout, use, and the type of information presented to the driver. So this is going to address these issues. We're going to be building prototype trucks and developing test procedures. We are going to be conducting vehicle testing for performance and driver vehicle interface driver acceptance. We're going to estimating safety benefits for commercial vehicle applications. We are going to identify commercial vehicle policy issues and coordinate with the rest of the overall V2V programs. Finally, all of this work is going to support the regulatory decisions which I mentioned before for commercial vehicles will be 2014.
This is the Commercial Vehicle V2V Research Plan roadmap which is even more of an eye chart than the overall plan, but one thing to point out is that this plan looks of the same thing that we are considering for light vehicles but with a focus on commercial vehicles. I would like to briefly mention three research projects that we initiated last year and are nearing completion. These are the Development of Performance Requirements, the Indentify Priority Commercial Vehicle Interoperability Issues, and Identify Priority Commercial Vehicle Human Factors Issues.
So I would like to go over the 2010 Commercial Vehicle V2V Research Project. These are interoperability issues, performance requirements for applications and driver-vehicle interface needs. So we are doing research in these areas? For the first step, we want to answer the fundamental questions that need to be resolved for deployment of V2V systems to lay a foundation for our research program for heavy vehicles. These projects were awarded last year. The interoperability issue project is being conducted by the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute (UMTRI) in Ann Arbor Michigan. The development of performance requirements for applications is being done by the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute or VTTI in Blacksburg, Virginia. The driver-vehicle interface needs project is being conducted by the Battelle Center for Human Performance and Safety in Seattle, Washington. All three of these projects are nearing completion and we will be able to share the results of this research later in the year.
For the next steps in the research coming up this year and beyond, we will start building prototype trucks with integrated V2V systems and we are now close to awarding the contract for this. We will be doing some objective testing of V2V systems at the NHTSA test center in Ohio. We'll be conducting driver clinics with trucks that have V2V systems installed to driver acceptance data. We'll be publishing an RFP and awarding a contract to develop retrofit V2Vsystems. Commercial vehicles will be participating in the large scale demonstration called Safety Pilot and my colleague Cem Hatipoglu will be describing the commercial vehicle program in the Safety Pilot coming up in the next presentation. I mentioned before, after this is all completed we will be estimating the safety benefits of our V2V commercial vehicles and all of this work supports the NHTSA regulatory decision and 2014 for the commercial vehicles.
That concludes my presentation. My contact information is on the screen. I would like to invite you to visit the NHTSA website at www.NHTSA.gov. You can also visit the ITS program website at the link given. We also have a commercial vehicle specific page on vehicle safety communications on the TIMTC website which is www.freightmobility.org. With that, I will turn it back over to Jennifer.
Jennifer Symoun
Thank you. I know we have a number of questions typed in and we will get to those after the presentations. I do I reminded want to remind everyone that these presentations are available for download on the lower right-hand corner of your screen, and there are instruction on how to download the file. I am now going to turn it over to Cem Hatipoglu Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration.
Cem Hatipoglu
Thank you Jennifer. Again, my name is Cem Hatipoglu and I'm with the FMCSA's Technology Division. I am going to talk to you today about the wireless connectivity and how we can use that to improve commercial vehicle safety. Building upon Alrik's presentation, I will be talking about a complementary safety aspect which is leveraging wireless connectivity in the vehicle infrastructure communication framework. I will also give a little bit more detail about in the Safety Pilot part of the presentation about plans for commercial motor vehicles.
The overview: ''ll be talking about the vehicle to infrastructure concept in context and then talk about some V2I opportunities and how we can use that to improve safety; both the vehicle safety and the traffic safety and ultimately the highway safety. The second part of this presentation we will talk about Safety Pilot and the commercial motor vehicle participation. Again, there is no shortage of detailed documentation on any specific area. Please contact us for any additional information.
With vehicle to vehicle communication, all the vehicles are talking to each other. When they all talk to each other, then the vehicle itself is aware of the traffic and the congestion around it and can assess the risk accordingly, therefore it can create warnings for the driver. For example, in the commercial vehicle application, there are a lot of blind spots, and when your vehicle knows everyone around you it can warn you and the problem becomes less of an issue.
Using that same concept of communication, wireless connectivity, vehicle to infrastructure is now where we actually talk to some sort of infrastructure. What we mean by that is the roadside equipment, bridges, traffic lights, railroad crossings, etc. Again this is not the exclusive list of items, but we can actually communicate, in some manner, to get critical information for vehicle itself to process. The picture you are seeing is actually what you see if you do not communicate. One case is the low clearance bridge issue that we see. This issue does not only have safety implications, but also a loss of productivity as well as the cost of infrastructure to repair. We are primarily trying to leverage wireless connectivity to be able to improve safety.
Another example here is the intersection safety. It is actually a hybrid V2V and V2I application working together kind of example. This is a very typical case where at an intersection you have the numerous vehicles around and in addition there is a traffic light. You have the opportunity to provide some guidance to the driver if someone is about to violate a traffic light that is red for them. There is no current existing technology that can help you in this kind of scenario. This kind of wireless technology if you can communicate in a wide range of vehicles around you, you would be able to do things that are not possible with existing technology today.
As most of you know wireless communication can be done in many different ways. We've been using cell phones for years, and there is satellite, Bluetooth, WiFi, and the Dedicated Short Range Communications (DSRC) protocol. The DSRC is being primarily focused on V2V for this framework because it has a secure way of running the wireless connectivity into vehicles. On the vehicle infrastructure side of the equation, we are also seeing some new possibilities of using that mechanism. At a very high level, V2V safety enhancing applications which have three core functions. The first one is to identify the "relevant information" that you want to communicate and exchange with your surrounding vehicles and environment, and then you have to communicate that using some sort of method that can be understood by everyone, and then finally assessing that information and being able to provide risk analysis for providing some sort of warning or actual active intervention to benefit the driver. The bottom line here is we are trying to improve safety, mobility, and efficiency through secure wireless communications.
Most of you may have been involved in quite a bit of the wireless connectivity projects in the past. I have to admit this is not a new concept, especially in the commercial vehicle framework because trucks are very well suited to leverage vehicle to infrastructure safety enhancing functions by nature; trucks need to go through roadside inspections and weigh stations. Details about the enforcement side of using V2I and the side of the safety enforcement will be described in very good detail by my colleague Chris Flanigan who is coming up next. We are trying to make sure that we leverage \ everything that has been done so far and build upon it with this framework and basically leverage everything that exists out there within this umbrella.
This by no means is an exclusive list of everything that we can do with V2I. I tried to separate these into two different brackets. The one on the right hand side says crash relevant. Those are the cases where it would benefit the driver based on some condition such as the road curvature or an oncoming turn which may be very dangerous or pose the possibility of a rollover. In this framework infrastructure has the potential to give warning to the driver. It is not only in passing info on the side of the road, whether or not the driver may or may not see, it is a communication to the vehicle that it will make sure the risk is communicated to the driver. High-grade or brake fade warning or speed limit and all warnings fall into that category of "crash imminent" because if you do not take action you may actually have an incident. On the left side there are opportunities mostly on the enforcement manner in which you provide a safety benefit, but it is more proactive and predictive. The point here is that if you find signal methods to leverage connectivity to pull the unsafe drivers off the road, you are providing a safety benefit and you are trying to leverage this connectivity into that framework as well. Again, my colleague Chris will talk about this in a lot more detail in the next presentation.
What is next? NHTSA has a 2013-2014 timeline for regulatory decision on DSRC based technologies. There is a lot of DOT research that is ongoing right now. The primary reason is we are trying to make vehicle to infrastructures and vehicles to vehicle communication-based technology become a reality. Part of this plan is that the Safety Pilot test that Kate outlined and that will take place in 2012. Going back to the Safety Pilot, in support of NHTSA's regulatory decision, Safety Pilot will take place with all modes participating. The location will have a dense concentration of light vehicles, commercial vehicles, transit vehicles, and roadside equipment with the DSRC technologies. We cannot exclude vehicles that are not featuring this technology from entering that vehicle network but it will have a concentration of vehicles that you can actually make sensible conclusions out of this kind of technology on a large scale. It is primarily in the hands of real operators and drivers driving their own routes. This does not mean all these other efforts are not taking place; they are all taking place. The Safety Pilot is more like a final stage of series of numerous tests.
Commercial vehicles are participating in this Safety Pilot. There will be about 3000 total vehicles in this pilot with about 61 commercial vehicles. Overall the number of commercial vehicles looks small, but it provides a good statistical level to where we can make conclusions out of it. Our position is that commercial vehicle participation in a meaningful way are important not only for commercial motor vehicles but the entire vehicle network because we pose unique challenges to the network. Commercial vehicles pull long and heavy loads. You can imagine that bobtail tractors are going to have an option of picking up longer or short trailers, or double trailers. Also, light vehicle are going to try to get through the obstacles. When this obstacle is a commercial vehicle, it is important to identify the proper lengths and dimensions so that we can provide a safety warning. In our experiments, we are going to use 11, what I call fully functional systems. There will be 50 Here I Am (HIA) vehicles. For those who do not know what these vehicles are, these are going to kind of the least detailed level of information that you can provide for the network. It is like a heartbeat; it says here I am, here are all my parameters. It gives information necessary for the rest of the vehicles that have that capability to take action. The last thing I want to mention here is that the truck team is very proactive in the Safety Pilot and also in all aspects of getting this wireless connectivity on the truck platform. It is a very multi-modal effort and everyone is really focused on getting it's the infrastructure needs.
On this page you see my contact information. If anyone is interested, please feel free to contact us. I will now turn it back over to Jennifer.
Jennifer Symoun
Thank you. As I mentioned, all of these sites are available for download on the lower right-hand corner of your screen and will be posted online in the next few weeks. I am now going to turn it over to our last presenter of the day, Chris Flanigan who is also of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration.
Chris Flanigan
Thank you Jennifer. I am Chris Flanigan I am with the Office of Analysis Research Technology, Technology Division same as Dr. Hatipoglu. I appreciate being able to talk to everybody about our Smart Roadside Initiative. What I'm going to talk about today is just to give a little bit of background where we have been, I want to talk about the current work that we have just kicked off, and I'm going to go to some of our future goals that we look to accomplish in this initiative.
What is the Smart Roadside Initiative? As Dr. Hatipoglu mentioned, vehicle to infrastructure communications are nothing new, especially when dealing in the field of commercial vehicles. So in 2006, 2007 Federal Highway and Federal Motor Carriers got together and began collaborating on a means to better utilize the technology with the goal of enhancing the roadside enforcement process. After this process, we came up with the initiate vision and in 2008 we conducted a workshop coordinated by Federal Motor Carriers and Federal Highway along with the Florida Department of Transportation sponsored a workshop included members of the enforcement community and other commercial stakeholders. The goal of this meeting was to first of all relate our vision of what we saw the Smart Roadside concept as and wanted to explore the opportunities to utilize the technology to enhance the enforcement process. I wanted to identify any issues or concerns. It is important to involve stakeholders and engage them all. Finally, we wanted to initiate partnerships. A lot of things were going on in that area and we wanted to make sure that everyone had the benefit of others knowledge and moving forward with this program.
Essentially what we came up with is that commercial vehicle stakeholders would share data seamlessly with relative in parties with the goal of improving motor vehicle safety in general, security, reduction of delay, increase productivity, and freight mobility. We would achieve this vision through the use of interoperable technologies and information sharing between vehicles, on the road and freight facilities systems. This is key; whenever possible we wanted to leverage current technology that stakeholders had already invested in to augment existing programs. We did not want to go down a different road and conflict with the good work that has already been undertaken and invested by the enforcement community.
That was 2008, what have we done since then? On the screen here you see four main areas. These are certainly not the only areas that the community has moved forward on but these are the four main areas that we have looked into. Essentially, these are the elements of the smart roadside division. The first is the Wireless Roadside Inspection Program and in a nutshell, truck numbers and mileage grow every year, but the roadside inspection and safety remain constant because in this economic climate it is difficult to dedicate more resources to the task. One of the key things that we have found in our research is the likelihood of a roadside safety inspection is far less than that of a truck being weighed which is also important. From a safety standpoint, we looked at 3.4 million annual truck inspections and came with a 70% total violation rate. Out of the about 85 million weight inspections conducted every year, there are about a three-tenth of a percent of total violation rate. We believe that the reason this is, is because a carrier or truck driver realizes you know him the likelihood of him getting weighed is very high so they make sure that they comply. Conversely, the likelihood of getting an inspection which is a manually intensive process is very low so perhaps some of them let it slip to the wayside. The goal of this inspection program is to utilize these technologies that currently exist and to dramatically increase the number of safety inspections.
The next one on the list is universal identification for commercial motor vehicles. Currently all commercial vehicles have a universal identification in the form of a DOT number painted on the side of the truck and on the license plate. But getting this information and processes is very intensive and a manual process that takes a lot of manpower and it is very cumbersome and to do a large number of vehicles in a short amount of time. One of the things we're looking at in working in concert with Federal Highway on is to utilize technologies like dedicating short range communications, cellular communications, radio frequency IDs on transponders, and even optical readers that could pick up the DOT number and license plate readers. The main goal here is to take this information quickly and get the information to an enforcement officer about that vehicle and to determine whether there is an issue with the carrier or the driver itself. We see this as really a key enabler for many of the applications I'm going to talk about today. To be able to envision a smart roadside national program, this would be a key enabler.
Okay the next one is electronic screening/virtual weigh stations. This is an essential way to streamline operations for safety and size and weight and credentialing enforcement. This is a way to determine if the vehicle needs to be inspected and it basically gets the carriers that are compliant through quickly and can identify potentially unsafe carriers by a more streamlined process. The final item that we have been working on, we've been looking at technologies for a truck parking program to deal with the fact that when a driver is a reaching the end of his hours of service and goes to park and there is no parking for him then he has two choices: he can either park illegally or continue driving past his hours of service to the next available parking area. This obviously is unsafe with drowsy driving and also parking is unsafe on the side of the road. One thing that we are looking at is how to tell that driver whether there is a parking spot waiting and allow him to better plan his trips as to where there will be available parking down the road.
Okay, I mentioned a number of things that we're looking at. There are currently systems out there already, states have deployed systems and we have initiated or helped states deploy them. Essentially, the main vehicle which FMCSA uses is the commercial Vehicle Information Systems and Networks (CVISN) grant program. It is listed in the SAFETEA-LU, Section 4126. There are two levels of CVISN; there are the core requirements which look at the exchange of safety information between states and electronic screening which I mentioned and electronic credentialing. We provide grant money to a state and they meet the criteria established for these first core requirements they can then move into an area that we call expanded CVISN. This area of the legislation is where smart roadside is actually defined. The areas that we are moving out on are enhancing exchange of information which is a key goal. Virtual weigh stations where we could have an unmanned inspection station that would gather information from the vehicle and then send it to the enforcement officer is there is an issue or just maintain the information. Finally another area is supplying a number of states with license plate and DOT readers to alleviate the manual requirement of reading the license plate for DOT number and then processing that information.
What are we doing right now well? We just kicked off in the last couple months the next phase of the Smart Roadside Initiatives. We just awarded a contract and what I am going to talk about is what we want to do in this phase. As I mentioned, there is a lot of equipment already out there and in use. There are a lot of research programs in the DOT and the outside and so we want to look at those. We want to develop a concept of operations. We also want to do some prototype developing testing. We have not decided what the prototype will be, but we will indentify that in the initiative part of the work. Finally throughout the program as a mentioned earlier it is very important to get our stakeholders' opinion on things to determine what works and what hasn't worked. We want to facilitate stakeholder outreach in a number of ways.
The first step, we are actually finishing up some work on that now, is that we want to identify projects that can contribute to this framework. There are number of things out there other than CVISN such as states like New York, New Mexico, Mississippi that went out on their own and have deployed systems and created smart roadside applications. We wanted to assess the state of the land; what works and what doesn't work with what is out there. We also wanted to do an assessment on existing FMCSA road side IT systems. This is the meat of data transfer. What kind of information is being gathered, where is it going, and how can be utilized in these current systems?
Concurrently were going to conduct an application analysis and assessment of current research projects. This is going to be comprised of a literature review on what is been done in the past historical studies, what programs exist now, and what are some of the results of the field tests conducted in this area. It is very important to spend some time on this and get a handle on what is been done and what people have learned from this. We also want to define a relationship between smart roadside and the current vehicle connectivity research being conducted by DOT. How does this fit into the big picture? How does the commercial vehicle specific research fit in with the entire vehicle population?
One of the areas that we plan to get to in the near future is to develop a concept of operations for the smart roadside initiative. We are looking at a number of different areas that we have already identified. These are not all of them, but this is kind of our starting point. The first one is identifying entities on the road. Universal ID will be critical to being able to process a large number of inspections or to be able to determine the weight or to be able to virtually inspect a vehicle. The second: sharing information and establishing a common framework. How will this information be shared? There are a number of existing architectures which must be accounted for and there are also a number of current state systems that need to be assessed and determined where they were going to fit in to the vision of the national system. The next is enhanced electronic screening, both attended and unattended. I've mentioned earlier, but we need to be able to determine in real-time whether a vehicle can bypass or should bypass a weight station and eliminate the need for manual screening. This is really cumbersome and this is a far better way to get a good read on what is out there and what the issues on our and potential issues are with the truck. Integrating public and private-sector data, we want to coordinate efforts. The public and private sectors cannot be headed in different sections. We don't miss any opportunities or to put it efforts and we don't want to choose any incompatible solutions that may conflict with these two sectors data. This is an area that we're going to be looking into. Streamlining and accelerating inspections is essentially the wireless roadside inspections and the goal is to dramatically increase the inspections, the safety inspections especially. Finally, the last is the performance-based standards and architecture. We need to ensure that the necessary standards and protocols are developed to support the operations across the country and keep in mind the data privacy issues in security and access requirements these are the main areas and like I said this is not the be-all and end-all, this is really our starting point.
As I mentioned, we want to move into a smart roadside prototype. The way will be doing this task is very straightforward, we will come up with system requirements for it, what kind of architecture would it need, we will do a component level design, and we are going to do prototype development and testing. Next, we will build and install a prototype and get into some field testing. And very importantly we will need to have documentation at the end so that when we move into a full scale field to operational testing of this prototype, we would then be able to re-create what we did and learned in this initial test.
Okay stakeholder outreach is incredibly important for this process and project it is in critical to involve the community. We want to do this through trucking conferences, the ATA, and webinars like this. We are considering conducting workshops along the way as well. One of the ways we want to make folks aware of this is by a website that is up, but it is not populated yet. The website is www.SmartRoadsideInitiative.com. We will put all relevant documents there; it will have the proceedings of 2008 workshop in Florida to try to give a basis. As we develop deliverables throughout a course of the project we'll post them there.
Where do we want to be and what of our next step? Field operational test are certainly in the plans. We want to complete them by 2014. Strategic goals for CVISN/SRI are by 2016 we want to set goals within FMCSA to have all states to be core CVISN compliant and then to look at 50% of the state deploying some expanded CVISN applications.
If there are any questions, please feel free to give me a call. Tom Kearney is my colleague at Federal Highway and we are the co-managers of this project so please feel free if there are any questions to give either one of us a call and we can certainly help you. Thank you very much.
Jennifer Symoun
Thank you Chris. We are going to move on to the Question and Answer section now. I will bring back up the main slide with all of the presenters contact information as well as some other web addresses.
I'm going to read through the list of questions that have been typed in. For some of them, I am not quite sure who they were asked to so whoever feels it's appropriate to answer can just jump in and respond. The first one was directed to Kate. When do you plan to announce the specific Pilot/Demonstration projects?
Kate Hartman
I'm not sure this is about the Safety Pilot or the future pilots that are being planned. None of them have been selected. They are currently points along a roadmap. The Safety Pilot procurement is going to be an open, competitive procurement which should be coming out within the next few weeks. The other mobility pilots have not even been designed. This question may also be related to the actual mobility the application and if that is the case then this will be announced at TRB. The actual specific ones and the intent at this point is to focus on ConOps development initially this year and then do some of the actual applications testing in 2012 or 2013.
J. Symoun
Thank you, Kate. The next question is for you as well. Do you already have the regions identified for the pilot projects?
K. Hartman
No. The intention is that things will be competitive.
J. Symoun
Okay. It was mentioned that safety is the major objective. As such, will the NHTSA be the lead governing agency?
Alrik Svenson
Well as far as NHTSA's role in terms of V2V regulatory decisions, NHTSA is the agency that develops the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards so any equipment or performance that vehicles are required to meet would come under NHTSA. I hope this answers your question.
Chris Flanigan
I will throw in that the FMCSA is for safety as well as any enforcement applications that I described certainly would be developed and overseen by FMCSA.
J. Symoun
So would it be correct to say that there is no one specific lead government agency?
C. Flanigan
Federal Highway will be involved as well when it comes to size and weight enforcement. So while there is not one lead, there are leads for each element. As Alrik mentioned, the lead for standards in vehicle equipment will be NHTSA, for some safety enforcement it would be FMCSA, and Federal Highway will lead size and weight enforcement as well as productivity.
J. Symoun
Okay thank you. Can you provide any detail as to how "vehicle control" technology will work?
A. Svenson
Well in terms of V2V, that is still yet to be determined. Currently there are systems available on vehicles that actually take control and do a corrective measure if you get into trouble. Electronic stability control is doing this on light vehicles and heavy vehicles already. Systems are coming on the market that automatically brake the vehicle when something is sent into your pathway that the driver has not responded to fast enough and could potentially prevent a collision. A lot of these systems are now being developed in terms of a vehicle safety communication as opposed to a sensor based type of system. Any of those systems could at some point be developed from V2V applications.
J. Symoun
What will happen if there is a power failure or loss of satellite, cellular or DSRC?
Cem Hatipoglu
I will try to answer. This is a very good question, but it is broader than that. What are the failure modes of operation and there is emphasis on research being done in understanding when certain things go wrong what happens to the vehicle network. It is different in every case, but in the vehicle to vehicle communication framework if the device is on the vehicle to primarily give short range communication it takes its power from the vehicle so when the vehicle is on, it will have power. If the device loses power, it would be displayed inside the vehicle. If it is a communication with a roadside device then what I have described in the infrastructure framework I don't want to go into too much detail on how we can actually make that happen. I think first thought that comes to mind is in the middle of nowhere there is a piece of roadside equipment that is trying to tell me about a low clearance bridge and it loses its power, what happens? Again I don't think we described all the ways of doing it, but one of the ways of doing that kind of thing is -because it is not a changing variable, so there are ways -to upload a truck device with all of the low clearance bridges in the state without need of each location to have a device. All we need to know is that, at the specific coordinates is that, there is low clearance bridge kind of risk and then the operator or driver of the vehicle notified of this location of whether he is approaching one of these locations, can actually stop. I don't think there is a single answer at this point. We are more at the preliminary stages of defining the protocols and what the possibilities are. When you get into actual deployment, those are hard questions that need to be addressed.
J. Symoun
Thank you. Are protocols under development for signal encryption or other hack/disruption resilience for V2V or V2I communications?
A. Svenson
A lot of work is being done under the light vehicle side based on security, certificate of authority, and how to prevent malicious attacks on the system. The commercial vehicle program is involved with that because this is essentially applicable to all vehicle types, but it is being done on the light vehicle side of the larger program. This work is actually carried out through the program known as CAMP which is the Collision Avoidance Metrics Partnership.Measure Partnership. It is an alliance of eight vehicle manufacturers. So this is one issue that is being taken very seriously and a lot of work is being done in this area.
C. Hatipoglu
Specifically on the DSRC side, it is a balancing between privacy and security. When you are communicating your information, how do you know they are encrypted or even sent at all? On the other side, when you're receiving messages how you know it is reliable information? There is a big emphasis on making sure that the security and privacy is in the framework that we are dealing with.
J. Symoun
Many commercial and transit vehicle drivers are primarily Spanish speaking. Will the smart messages be relayed in a choice English, Spanish or some other language?
C. Hatipoglu
I think that the specific needs will be identified in a user initiative specifically on the commercial vehicle side, that is a very good comment and it is probably more of an important need on the commercial vehicle side than on the light vehicle side. At this point we are collecting what the requirements and user needs are. At the end of the day, I think when the decisions are done I think the technologies will be developed and handled and taken to the next stages by the OEMs through natural the progression. At this point, it is a very good feedback and that it is identified by talking to parties in the commercial motor vehicle world and similar specific needs were identified that are more specific to the commercial world. I think the user needs work was done by Battelle, or was it Virginia Tech? Yes, Virginia Tech did this work by contacting numerous commercial vehicle experts to get this kind of feedback. They looked at the specific needs of the commercial vehicle from the V2I design standpoint. When it is commercialized, the producers of these technologies will address these needs.
J. Symoun
Do any of the presenters have any thoughts on interoperability with similar initiatives in Canada and Mexico?
C. Flanigan
I can take that one, this is Chris Flanigan. Currently we have are kicking off work and we are working in concert with Federal Highway to streamline the border crossing process to enhance the screening of vehicles coming into the country, to identify them like with wireless roadside inspections, in a far more streamlined manner. I am not aware of current systems that are in Canada or Mexico. I think that is a good thing that we should address down the road once we have our system designed or part of the system designed to an account for any current systems that are in neighboring countries. It would certainly help to have the connectivity as well and it certainly is an area that we will consider. I am not aware of any systems that are in Canada or Mexico that are similar.
J. Symoun
I don't currently see any other questions typed in, but feel free to keep adding them. I do want to give a chance to open up the phone lines to see if anyone has the questions over the phone. The operator will give instructions on how to ask a question.
Operator
At this time I like to remind everyone that in order to ask a question, please press star than the one on your telephone keypad. We will pause for just a moment to compile a roster. Again, if you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your keypad. There are no questions at this time on the phone.
J. Symoun
I will just check with the presenters. Were there any questions sent directly which I may have not seen?
C. Flanigan
I don't see any questions.
J. Symoun
Well, if there are no more questions I will end this a little bit early. I will go ahead and read through the closeout is right now, but if you do think of something, go ahead and type it in.
I do want to thank all four of our presenters and everybody in attendance of our seminar. The recording will be available within the next few weeks at our Talking Freight website and I will send out an e-mail to everybody when that is available. If you are an AICP member, as a reminder this seminar is not yet available on the AICP website for certification and maintenance credits but I will send out an e-mail to everyone who registered to let you know when it's available. You can download instruction on how to obtain these credits from the file share box on the lower right corner of your screen. I also want to encourage you to download the evaluation form, and send it back to me after you completed it.
The next seminar will be held on February 16 and is called Riding the U.S. and Global Economic Rebound - Opportunities and Challenges. This seminar is currently available for registration and you can register by going to the link being shown on your screen.
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