ICT infrastructure guidelines and plan in VIKING for harmonising deployment

There is no deployment guideline in EasyWay for ICT infrastructure. This paper demonstrates that such deployment guidelines could be done and shows an example from VIKING how it can be done. Harmonised ICT infrastructure supports continuity of ITS services across border or along international corridors. In EasyWay VIKING, the work to harmonise deployment of ICT infrastructure was started by developing ICT Infrastructure Guidelines and Plan. The objective of the guidelines was to provide recommendations for the quality requirements of ICT infrastructure in the VIKING area of the EasyWay action. Applying these quality requirements should ensure the provision of core European ITS services on the EasyWay VIKING network with at least minimum quality with regard to the user and society benefits. The guidelines build on the TELTEN-2 guidelines, existing national guidelines, and those developed within the previous VIKING actions, as well as the quality requirements specified by the other EasyWay and VIKING activities for the core European ITS services. Development of guidelines for ICT infrastructure was a slow and long process, requiring consensus formation in its various steps. These guidelines are the first of their kind for the whole ICT infrastructure in the EasyWay VIKING area. The guidelines development work is to be further continued in EasyWay, in close co-operation with the other EasyWay regions and activities. To support the deployment of guidelines, a plan was made for the deployment of ICT infrastructure in VIKING area for years 2010-2013 and 2013-2020. ICT Infrastructure plan includes deployment of monitoring, information management, traffic centres, DATEX II and ITS architecture. The EasyWay VIKING Infrastructure Plan is the first of its kind. For this reason, it is far from perfect. It suffers from the fact that today all of the EasyWay partners do not have long term development plans for ITS, nor the related ICT infrastructure. This situation may slightly improve with the recent adoption of the EU ITS Action Plan and Directive setting requirements to the member states to provide national ITS action plans and strategies in response to these EU actions. It is also clear that it has been easier to develop and describe future plans for some areas of ICT infrastructure than others. This is partly due to longer experience with some parts of ICT infrastructure such as monitoring and traffic centres, but also partly due to the existence of well-established quality recommendations and cost information in some areas such as monitoring. The most ambitious part of the infrastructure plan has certainly been to plan for the deployments in the period 2013-2020. The planning and forecasting for this period is difficult not only due to lacking long-term plans, but also due to the quick technology development. The cooperative systems utilising vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communications will likely be deployed to the EasyWay network during the period and will have a major impact on the form, coverage and quality of different levels of ICT infrastructure. Generally there is a need to devote more resources in the long-term planning of ITS deployment including ICT infrastructure deployment. This is especially important now in the advent of cooperative systems, and the long-term planning should carefully address the likely role of cooperative systems in the future developments and especially deployment and the investments required. The future cooperative systems also mean that any future ICT infrastructure plan must devote a major part of it to the communication infrastructures required by the cooperative systems.