The Smart Roadside Initiative (SRI) began in 2008 with the Smart Roadside Workshop sponsored by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA), the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), and the Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT). The participants at the workshop agreed that commercial vehicle safety, security, and mobility systems should be linked into a coordinated and comprehensive roadside program. Smart Roadside is now an approved mode-specific item in the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) Strategic Research Plan, 2010-2014. Given this, there is now a recognized need to initiate work to perform a Needs Analysis and develop a Concept of Operations for the re-initiated Smart Roadside work.
The current commercial vehicle environment consists of numerous Federal, State, regional, and private-sector programs that use a combination of manual, semi-automatic, and advanced technologies to support safety, mobility and security. The effectiveness of these programs will be greatly improved by the Smart Roadside concept as relevant and appropriate data is shared among the current systems and they are integrated in a collaborative fashion. Smart Roadside can be simply described as an integrated system deployed at strategic points along commercial vehicle routes to improve safety, mobility and efficiency of truck movement and operations on the roadway.
Smart Roadside Vision
The vision for the Smart Roadside is one in which commercial vehicles, motor carriers, enforcement resources, highway facilities, intermodal facilities, toll facilities, and other nodes on the transportation system collect data for their own purposes and share the data seamlessly with the relevant parties, in order to improve motor carrier safety, security, operational efficiency, and freight mobility. This vision will be achieved through the application of interoperable technologies and information sharing between in-vehicle, on-the-road, and freight facility systems. Whenever possible, the Smart Roadside will leverage stakeholders' current technology investments in order to augment existing programs and support new activities.
Project Objective
- Investigate and identify successful deployments of truck related roadside technologies (for example, Commercial Vehicle Information Systems and Networks, CVISN) that are currently in use to understand their potential of contributing to SRI goals and objectives and the possibility of their inclusion in the SRI framework.
- Review Smart Roadside research that is complete or underway to validate the candidate applications for SRI, identify possible enhancements to these applications, and understand how they may be brought together under a common operating framework.
- Conduct analysis to determine the high value CVO/Freight applications that will be initially addressed for V-I deployment;
- Assess stakeholder/user needs, goals, expectations, operational environment, processes, and characteristics of the proposed SRI prototype.
- Apply systems engineering principles to develop and validate prototypes of these applications. Development of prototypes shall start with Concept definition and end with working applications that are suitable to include in a field operational test.
Project Scope
The scope of SRI is quite broad. In order to successfully launch what FMCSA and FHWA envision being the first phase of research needed to advance this Initiative, the federal agency partners have identified four programs and projects to be the primary focus of the overall Concept of Operations and application prototype(s). These four programs/projects are:
- Wireless Roadside Inspections;
- Universal Truck Identification;
- Virtual Weigh Station/Electronic Screening; and
- Truck Parking Programs (FMCSA's “Smart Park” and FHWA’s “SAFETEA-LU Section 1305 Program”).