Multimodal and Accessible Travel (MAT) Standards and Vulnerable Road User (VRU) Cybersecurity Support

The United States Department of Transportation (USDOT) and the Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE) and their standards development partners, AASHTO and NEMA have worked on Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) standards since the inception of the ITS Standards Program more than 20 years ago. In recent years, traditional ITS technologies have started to integrate with multimodal transportation and support vulnerable road users (VRUs). Working with the multimodal community to survey existing standards and how they can support/augment ITS implementations is a necessary step. Additionally, ensuring  the security needs of VRUs are addressed in both standards and ITS deployments is critical to the safety and security of those VRUs. Previously, USDOT  ran a Multimodal Accessible Travel (MAT)  Standards project that produced a MAT Standards Assessment and Roadmap  this project is expected to build on. This project is to define critical activities to better address the convergence of ITS technologies with multimodal and accessible transportation and VRUs.

The objective of this project is to continue the work—started under the Multimodal and Accessible Travel Standards project—to address gaps in standards and deployment guidance for MAT and VRU technologies when integrating with ITS environments and technologies, including connected vehicle (CV) technologies. Identifying the unique security and privacy risks associated with VRUs participating in ITS environments is a key activity that will be used to inform future cybersecurity guidance and standards development efforts. Coordinating and managing MAT standards engagements and developing MAT use cases are key follow-on efforts to the original MAT work that was accomplished. Finally, developing a mobility-on-demand (MOD) operational readiness assessment framework will support the future deployments of MOD technologies and help state and local agencies prepare for their deployments.