Background

The American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO), the Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE) and the National Electrical Manufacturers Association (NEMA) have executed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) for the joint development of the Advanced Transportation Controller (ATC) suite of standards for the ITS community. These three Standard Development Organizations (SDOs) have agreed that the development of these standards will assist state and local governments in the deployment of ITS technology in both urban and rural environments.

The ATC suite of standards provides an open architecture hardware and software platform which can support a variety of ITS applications. This means that the system can support both public and private sector developers and have modular software cooperatively running on standardized and shared, modular hardware platforms.

The ATC suite of standards includes the following:

• The Advanced Transportation Controller (ATC) Standard; (The “brains” or the field computer which manages the cabinet functions)
• ITS Standard Specification for Roadside Cabinets (This includes various constructs (e.g. input files) and subassemblies/subsystems to support the control and monitoring of field devices at the intersection/highway location)
• ATC Application Programming Interface (API) Standard (This creates a software suite to allow the sharing of the input-output and other controller resources for multiple applications at the street/field location)

For each application that the ATC serves, the cabinet and cabinet subsystems may be selected from a set of standard parts and subassemblies defined in the ITS Roadside Cabinets standard. The ITS Roadside Cabinet development committee initially targeted more traditional traffic control applications such as traffic signal control, ramp control, traffic surveillance stations, lane use signals, field masters, and lane control. As a result, the modular structure of the cabinet focused on providing rack space, power management, and serial buses for the classic traffic control input devices, load switching, and cabinet monitoring to ensure that the ITS cabinet is consistent with past practices for traffic control cabinets. In addition, the serial control and monitoring bus arrangement (similar to the NEMA TS2-2003 Type 1 cabinet) is modular in nature and supports the development of additional special function-oriented assemblies for ITS functions of the future.

Next Steps
The next phase (Version 2.0) of the ITS cabinet standards development program is now underway and is intended to re-visit the ITS Standard Specification for Roadside Cabinets v01.02.17b and use a Systems Engineering Process to captured/document the user needs and requirements for the next generation ITS roadside cabinet. This will be used as input to the development of version 2 of the ITS Standard Specification for Roadside Cabinets. The ITS cabinet working group, operating under the direction of the ATC Joint Committee, will be holding a user needs workshop, and subsequent working group meetings and teleconferences to complete this work. ConSysTec (Bruce Eisenhart), Pillar Consulting (Ralph Boaz), and Adaptive Solutions, Inc. (James Kinnard) have been retained under contract to the Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE) to provide consultant services to the working group to complete the preparation of Version 2.0 of this standard.

As this project unfolds, this web site will be updated with working drafts, user comments, meeting minutes, meeting agendas and other important information.

Participation
We are soliciting help from the community at large in this effort and stress that this is an open standards development process; input from any and all interested parties/stakeholders including manufacturers, public agencies, and integrators and consultants is welcome and requested. Please contact Mr. Siva Narla (snarla@ite.org) for additional information or to be placed on the email list for this working group.

The current working group roster is posted below and includes representatives from all of the stakeholder groups. However, we welcome participation at meetings, teleconferences, and document reviews from any and all interested parties. We will post a schedule of planned activities as they are determined and invite anyone interested to attend meetings and teleconferences. Please keep in mind that by necessity, we need to know if you wish to attend meetings so that we ensure adequate meeting facilities. In most cases, favorable hotel rates are also available to meeting attendees. If you wish to attend any face-to-face meeting, please inform Mr. Siva Narla (snarla@ite.org) so that we can make appropriate arrangements. Everyone is welcome and will be afforded an opportunity to actively participate in this effort.

• ITS Cabinet Working Group Members List
• ATC Joint Committee and Interested Parties

Tracking ITS Cabinet v2.0 by the SDO Process
(For complete details on the steps of the Standards Development Process please see: www.ite.org/standards/ITEStandardDevProcess.pdf)

Tracking ITS Cabinet v2.0 by the Project Plan
(For complete details on the steps of the Standards Development Process please see: www.ite.org/standards/APIRevProj.pdf)