BOSTON -- An ambitious effort to transform the nation's 40,000 miles of clogged interstate highways into an efficient, automated people-moving network has hit a familiar roadblock: insufficient standards.

The architects of the planned Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) are already forging the data-communications underpinnings of the network, which would link a raft of new services to the dashboard electronics of automated vehicles. But experts said the plan will stall unless standards efforts produce some results soon.

At an ITS conference sponsored here by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), smart-highway designers served up a smorgasbord of technologies intended to enable deployment of basic automation services by 2005. Yet, one conference participant voiced a common sentiment by asserting that transportation planners "often don't have a clue" about what happens to the technology in the field.

Coming off a successful dem-onstration of smart-car technology last summer in San Diego, standards groups are once again rolling up their sleeves to develop standards in communications and other areas needed to move automated-highway technology off the drawing board and on to the road. Standardization is considered critical, since the current highway system lacks interoperability.

Among the handful of standards bodies developing specs for the smart-highway network, the IEEE is working on network "message sets" for such early applications as electronic toll collection and automated border crossings. The engineering group is also developing layers 3 through 7 of the ITS communications protocol stack.

Other organizations, including the Society of Automotive Engineers, are working on an ITS data-bus standard that would link ITS services to future automated vehicles. Scheduled to be published early next year, the data-bus standard would be separate from the current vehicle-control bus used to manage cruise control, air bags and other electronic devices. It would also include a gateway that would serve as a firewall for new car-automation devices, ranging from navigation systems to advanced cruise control.

With navigation and collision-avoidance technologies such as Global Positioning System (GPS) receivers already making their way into automobiles, some worry that the addition of further devices via the data bus will bombard drivers with too much information. Robert Denaro, vice president and director of Motorola Inc.'s Position and Navigation Systems Business, said he is "really scared" about the potential for information overload.

Others acknowledged the looming problem but countered that the data bus will be designed to manage the devices for drivers.

The real interoperability issue is consistency of operation from one vehicle to the next, said Philip Spelt, director of the In-Vehicle Information Systems Development Center at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (Oak Ridge, Tenn.).

Interoperability issues are being tackled under an effort called the National Transportation Communication for ITS Protocol. The protocol will let many different devices operate on the same communications channel, according to Raman Patel, vice president of P.B. Farradyne (New York) and a member of the group developing the protocol standard.

Potential distraction
Still, Spelt acknowledged that as smart-car technologies advance, "we run the risk of creating an analog to the tactical fighter" on the passenger-auto dashboard. The multiple indicators and alarms could distract less sophisticated drivers, Spelt added.

Along with stable technical standards, experts here said the key to a smooth transition to smart cars and highways will be how smart technologies are integrated into cars and roads. For example, "we're witnessing the embedding of GPS," Denaro said. "It is disappearing inside applications" via low-cost chip sets.

"Wireless communications [will play] an important role in ITS," predicted Hiroshi Kojima, director of Japan's Vehicle Information and Communication System Center. He said more research is needed on higher frequency technologies.

"There's been an explosion of interest in combining communications with navigation," added Motorola's Denaro.

The ITS communications architecture is expected to feature high data rates and short range. A Dedicated Short Range Communications spec is being developed to provide those capabilities for such applications as toll collection and intersection collision avoidance.

But deployment has been as slow as the morning commute. "Because of a lack of standards, we're not seeing these applications being deployed as quickly as we'd like," said Ray Yuan of Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory (Columbia, Md.).

A U.S. transportation official told the conference that work on most of the communications specs will be completed in 1998. "Interoperability remains a key concern that may lead to additional plug and network standards not specified in the national [ITS] architecture," said the Transportation Department's Michael Schagrin.

Work on fleshing out a smart-highway architecture proceeds as Congress debates legislation that would fund the next leg of a national transportation system to the tune of $175 billion over the next six years.

Deployment of basic ITS services is scheduled for 2005. An automated highway network would be ready by 2012, backers said.

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