Activities

In order to continue standardisation activities based on operational user needs, and support DATEX II users in applying the standard(s) within their services, Activity 0 focuses on resource allocation, organising strategic (SG) and technical (TMG) meetings and performing risk management actions when needed. Executive decisions such as reviewing the tactical and strategic vision of DATEX II, preparing and processing meeting decisions, adopting the technical work plans, and establishing and carrying out a communication strategy, are also part of this activity. All parties involved in this activity also have a role to play in starting and maintaining liaisons with stakeholders for the further development of DATEX II.

This activity aims at supporting the operational implementation of the delegated regulations in the Member States. Since the scope of DATEX II is very wide, this activity has been divided into sub-tasks in order to support all types of implementations. This includes the creation of user guides and support tools, maintaining the DATEX II Academy, and organizing the bi-annual DATEX II User forum. This activity also involves information provision to the user community by managing user published content, the online forum to encourage discussion, the social media channels (Youtube and LinkedIn page), as well as further expanding promotional and supporting materials.

The location referencing approach of the DATEX II standard has been to try to integrate the existing standards into the DATEX II model so that it provides the main location referencing systems available today in DATEX II. For accurate location referencing the solution must include a high level of detail, as well as be flexible enough to be able to adapt to possible changes to the road infrastructure.

In addition to adding the Open LR extension in version 3, DATEX II has tried to integrate the existing standards into the DATEX II model, including ALERT-C, TPEG-Loc and EN ISO 19148, which presently make up the main location referencing systems available in DATEX II. Due to new 3D mapping technologies and equipment, the location reference of a moving event could affect the “static view”. The combination of the existing form of infrastructure managers and road operators with the arrival of a dynamic and precise location of moving event is therefore of added value to DATEX II.

This activity will provide DATEX data models to support the publication of electronic traffic bans and traffic regulations. It is intended to support the exchange of informational content from road traffic authorities issuing traffic regulation orders and organisations implementing these orders to other organisations providing ITS services or onward information exchange.

One major field of traffic related data not yet properly covered by the DATEX II model is traffic regulations. When the DATEX II Situation model had been created initially in the early millennium years, the focus of DATEX II had very much been on traffic management. Traffic regulations were hence covered mainly from the perspective of road operators. The parts of the model that cover them mix this aspect with pure traffic management activities like providing recommendations or information. On the other hand, it has meanwhile become clear that current ITS service – like navigation – suffer from the aspect of missing clear information about traffic restrictions due to traffic regulation. Future infrastructure support for automated driving will mandatorily require detailed traffic regulation information. This Activity has therefore been started to refactor traffic regulation in separate DATEX II v3.0 packages that can cover today’s requirements – e.g. regarding restricted zones in urban environment – and are prepared for future automated driving support.

Activity 5 handles the standardising of the method through which the content is delivered from one Centre to another. Precisely defining the exchange mechanism is crucial to improving the reliability and effective timing of Exchange to implement operational functionalities. This ensures reciprocal awareness of Processing and Information status among the centres.

DATEX Exchange Specifications have been designed to support two main business cases: Information Delivery and Collaborative ITS Services, the latter being the bidirectional data exchange needed to enable workflows to negotiate and agree on proposed ITS Service to be activated. Based on the level of maturity of the specifications, appropriately formatted specification and draft documentation is sent as an input to standardisation bodies as ISO and CEN to become an officially approved Technical Specification or Standard. Further tasks within Activity 5 include linking support to the Standardisation of Traffic Management Plans, the activities of which have been taken into account in document CEN TC278/WG17, which is publishing the TS 16157-8 Traffic Management Plan.

As the DATEX II model grows in complexity both in depth and number of functional parts, maintaining its accessibility and applicability for users is of increasing importance. This is the task of Activity 6. For example, due to the widening DATEX II domain, new “Use Case” domains beyond TMS are collected, along with the information subsets to assemble a profiled version of DATEX II as needed. Also, in response to the strong demand by road operators to open up their data to app developers in order to achieve maximum usability in the Open Data domain, the applicability of DATEX II in the open data domain can be improved by supporting standards that are used in the app development world.

Activity 7 of the DATEX II Programme Support Action (PSA) - ‘C-ITS Harmonisation’ - focuses on the developments in the domain of Cooperative-ITS (C-ITS) and especially its effect on information provision to and from road operators transferring data via DATEX II. Where information elements are used in both domains, DATEX II and C-ITS, or targeting the same domain concepts, it is crucial that definitions are harmonised.

The activity will come up with an analysis and inventory of European DATEXII-C-ITS implementations. Members of activity 7 will investigate upcoming C-ITS Day 1.5 applications and derive use-cases, where DATEX II might be needed to feed data into C-ITS services as well as for publishing DATEX II information that is received from a C-ITS system.

Since the DATEX II community also needs constant liaison with the C-ITS community, this activity also works to foster liaison between relevant and potential new partners in the world of C-ITS.

While other activities produce content for new items, the subsequent maintenance of those items is addressed in this Activity. Since DATEX II is a living standard, problems and small user requests are bound to arise. These are considered and addressed within this activity. All parts of the DATEX II standards, supportive tooling, documentation and user guidance that need continuous maintenance are called “DATEX II configuration items”.

Along with liaising with other standardisation organisations relevant to the DATEXII content specification, this activity is central to the DATEX II support action (Activity 1) because it established the European Standards and the modular version 3 with its many improvements in usability. Users of these specifications can be confident that the models have passed through an intense consensus-building process and have potential for deployment on a large scale.