Stellantis-CRF and CarmentaAutomotive have in a collaboration performed successful C-ITS interoperability testing in the context of the C-ROADS Italy 2 and NordicWay 3 projects.

Partners

Stellantis-CRF & CarmentaAutomotive

Scope

The scope of the activity was to perform a test of hazard warnings utilizing Vehicle-to-Network connectivity and the TrafficWatch product. Hazard warnings included in the tests were Emergency Vehicle Approaching and Road Works Warning.

Testing off-board filtering of road hazards

Towards the end of C-ROADS Italy 2, Stellantis-CRF performed a test of hazard warning using an alternative solution to the one used throughout C-ROADS Italy 2. The test utilizes TrafficWatch product which runs in a cloud environment as an automated off-board system and provides situational awareness for connected and automated vehicles.

TrafficWatch core functionality is to supervise and control ongoing vehicle operations by collecting and analyzing data about the surrounding environment and traffic situation. It detects upcoming risks and distributes warnings and instructions to connected systems and vehicles that may influence the safety and performance of the vehicles.

In practice, vehicles communicate their GPS position directly to TrafficWatch and in turn, TrafficWatch map matches the warning positions (e.g. warnings sent by road operators) to a road segment and calculates a Most Probable Path for each vehicle. When the Most Probable Path of the host vehicle intersects the event location, the appropriate warning message should be sent to the vehicle.

This means the onboard system is connected to the internet, to send GNSS position updates and to get DENM messages if they are relevant for the host vehicle. For comparison, without TrafficWatch, the V2X unit would receive all the messages in the area (according to Quadkeys) and then filter them based on DENM data (traces, relevance distance, etc.). In other words, the TrafficWatch solution would replace the filtering stage of the vehicle OBU, leaving only the message decoding task to perform on-board.

Results

Through the cooperation between Stellantis-CRF and CarmentaAutomotive within C-ROADS Italy 2 and NordicWay 3 respectively, the test results showed that:

TrafficWatch solution can operate with the message protocol suite used in C-ROADS Italy 2, namely with ETSI-compliant C-ITS messages.
C-ROADS Italy 2 system architecture is compatible with TrafficWatch solution and the NordicWay 3 project, confirming that the C-ROADS project parties are working at interoperable solutions.

References

NordicWay 3 project results are presented at https://www.nordicway.net/

C-Roads Italy 2 information can be found here:  https://www.c-roads.eu/pilots/core-members/italy/Partner/project/show/c-roads-2-italy.html