MARK IV Industries, developer of 5.9GHz toll and parking applications, has successfully completed formal testing under the Vehicle Infrastructure Integration Consortium (VIIC) Proof of Concept (POC) program.
The toll and parking applications use 5.9 GHz Dedicated Short Range Communications (DSRC), a wireless communication method that uses radio spectrum established by the Federal Communications Commission in 2003. The system works in conjunction with vehicle positioning systems, vehicle human/machine interfaces, security methods and surrogate payment services to conduct real-time, end-to-end, secure transactions with the vehicle. The developed applications made use of MARK IV's latest JANUS reader, which supports current 915MHz band and next generation 5.9GHz band Electronic Toll Collection (ETC) systems.
The development of these applications and the JANUS reader is part of MARK IV's ongoing commitment to ensuring its products are ready for integration with new technologies. Developed to be compatible with North American ETC systems, for which MARK IV is the major supplier, the toll application provides simultaneous, multiple-vehicle, real-time transactions at speeds up to, and more than, 100 MPH for any DSRC-compliant vehicle, achieving high-performance and direct financial payment. In the tests, toll points were set up in a variety of configurations including all lanes of a highway, a single lane (typical of High Occupancy Vehicle lanes), on an overpass and on ramps. A paper on aspects of the testing will be presented at the ITS World Congress in New York during November 2008.
The parking application, representative of any access control application, notified the driver about the availability of parking spaces. Secure payments were demonstrated using driver selection from a variety of payment cards.
The VIIC was established in 2004 to support the U.S. Department of Transportation's Vehicle Infrastructure Integration (VII) initiative on crash prevention and congestion relief through vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-roadside communication. The VIIC was formed to determine the feasibility of nationwide deployment of a VII program and to establish a strategy for implementation. VII information is available at: www.its.dot.gov/vii/index.htm.
To operationally test the VII concept, the VIIC and its partners established a test environment in Detroit, Michigan where they are conducting POC tests involving secure two-way communication between vehicles, and between vehicles and the roadside infrastructure. Equipment and applications were developed by industry suppliers including MARK IV. POC information is available at: http://www.vehicle-infrastructure.org/tests-demonstrations/.
