Automated Vehicles and Highway Systems

This section of the conference will deal with the underlying building blocks of an automated intelligent highway system. These building blocks centre around creating Mobile Wireless Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs.) and Vehicular Sensor Networks (VSNs).

These VANETs can be formed using Dedicated Short Range Communications DSRC based on Wireless LAN. In Europe, however, CALM (Continuous Air Interface for Long and Medium Distance) provides the first attempt to combine General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) with vehicle-optimized WLAN technology.

These networks will enable high-speed and reliable data exchange between vehicles and between the vehicles and the roadside infrastructure and satellites. The networks created from the vehicle to vehicle (V2V), vehicle to infrastructure (V2I) communications provide a real time picture of the surrounding environment, the position, speed and direction of other vehicles and the geometry, width, condition and availability of the road. This information underpins, among others, the safety applications such as collision avoidance warning and intervention which are dealt with in other sessions of the conference.

Exchanging data instantly and reliably is essential but processing and making sense of that data especially when there is an increasing amount emanating from a ubiquitous network at very high speed will require a large on-board processing capacity. On-board computers will need to be highly reliable and ultra fast. Software and middleware integrity and interoperability will be absolutely essential and other impediments to implementation such as security and privacy will need to be dealt with.

The conference will look at developments in all of these areas and try to assess the likely technical progress that might be made, both in mobile communications and in on-board computers and its implication for building successful VANETs over the next ten to twenty years.