Eusebiu Catana, Senior Manager, Connectivity & Automation at ERTICO, explains to Intelligent Transport how urban connectivity is transforming traditional services and infrastructure for a smarter tomorrow, also with the work of 5GMETA.

How is the Internet of Things (IoT) helping to make urban transport services and cities themselves better connected to one another?

After achieving a satisfactory performance on highways, IoT and autonomous driving systems have been focusing on more challenging scenarios related to urban environments. Urban driving adds much more complexity to IoT and automated vehicle solutions. In this an urban context, there are more things to be considered, such as traffic lights, roundabouts, crossroads, and sharing the road with vulnerable road users.

The integration of automated vehicles as IoT devices in future smart city platforms will be in a role as mobile sensors. This will provide valuable information to a city’s mobility management centre for traffic regulation, and will form a solid and valuable foundation for the management of hybrid traffic (automated/connected – non-automated/connected) in any future smart city. This solution could be replicated to other cities through new IoT solutions. Each mobility management centre from a given city could be connected to one or more similar mobility management centres in other cities.

On the vehicle side, on-board and infrastructure systems, together with V2X warnings, mean the electronic horizon extension has been brought to a new dimension. With C-ITS communication, the range is limited to the traffic lights of approaching intersections. However, IoT solutions will provide the basis for enabling access to a wider volume of data (e.g. different traffic lights, routing, pedestrian, hazard warnings, priority to automated vehicles) in any smart city.

In this context, there are also European-funded projects like 5GMETA that can help to build a common 5G-IoT platform for better urban transport services in cities. 5GMETA, in fact, will implement cutting-edge internationally accepted solutions, such as C-V2X, MEC, new CAM services.

Source: Intelligent Transport