Using the Canadian ITS architecture for evaluating the safety benefits of intelligent transportation systems

Abstract

The benefits of intelligent transportation systems (ITS) are indirectly represented by the annual world market for ITS, which according to ITS Canada (2002) will be $90 billion CAN by 2011. Improved safety is often cited as the top goal of implementing ITS. Despite the magnitude of these investments and their underlying goal to improve transportation safety, there are deficiencies in the quantity and quality of reported ITS safety benefits. Many of the benefits reported to date suffer from poor data, lack of an evaluation framework, and inconsistent terminology used to attribute benefits to ITS application areas. This paper explores these issues, while attempting to address one of them, namely the lack of an evaluation framework for assessing the safety benefits of ITS. Accordingly, a unique framework is developed based on the Canadian ITS architecture. The framework includes the identification of evaluation metrics that are mapped to the market packages in the Canadian ITS architecture and correlated with each other to capture the "cause" and "effect" flow of benefits. This framework will benefit future ITS safety evaluations by providing a structure for undertaking evaluations using terminology consistent with the Canadian ITS architecture.Key words: intelligent transportation systems, ITS architecture, safety benefits, safety evaluation.