The Road Traffic Advisor project

The Road Traffic Advisor (RTA) project is a collaboration between a number of leading companies, academic organisations and government departments, partly financed by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council via the Technology Foresight Challenge. It is a three-year project running from April 1997 to April 2000. This paper describes the development of the RTA project during its first two years, its plan for evaluation in the final year and initial ideas for follow-on projects. The project has developed an open, media-independent architecture and a set of protocols and messages building on the PROMETHEUS TRICS project. The demonstration uses dedicated short-range communications (DSRC) beacons operating at 5.8 GHz, allowing two-way data transfer between a moving vehicle and a stationary beacon. This technology provides location-specific information that is relevant to the road and direction being driven by the user, and can collect information about recent past performance on that road for both road management and driver information purposes