A validation tool for cooperative intelligent transport systems

Abstract This paper aims to present a set of tools that could be used in order to check the conformance of an Cooperative-Intelligent Transport System (C-ITS). These tools will consider each C-ITS component, i.e. C-ITS-R Road Side Units (RSU), C-ITS-V On-Board Unit (OBU), C-ITS-C (Central Server) with their specific features as location precision for an OBU and adequate forwarding of security events for an RSU. We first tackle in this study the conformance testing aspect for each component (in fact a C-ITS component has to respect all the basic specifications) before checking the interoperability of all components (in order to ensure a correct functioning when they work together). Basic specifications have been mainly described by standardisation institutes as ETSI or IEEE. But some additional specifications could be considered for particular purposes (for example, car manufacturers do not all agree on the pertinent moment to inform drivers on next hazardous events). This framework has been experimented with various RSUs and OBUs from different providers and many troubles have been detected. Most of the bugs are due to a wrong interpretation of specifications. But, in some other cases, troubles reveal that specifications have been proposed with incorrect behaviours. The main conclusion is that such frameworks have to be improved and deployed widely in order to facilitate the deployment of large scale Intelligent Transport Systems.