ITS Standards

ITS Standards are fundamental to the establishment of an open ITS environment, the goal originally envisioned by the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT). Standards facilitate deployment of interoperable systems at local, regional, and national levels without impeding innovation as technology advances and new approaches evolve.

The USDOT 's ITS Joint Program Office (JPO) is supporting SDOs (Standards Development Organizations) with an extensive, multi-year program of accelerated, consensus-based standards development to facilitate successful ITS deployment in the United States.

The USDOT ITS JPO's Standards Site provides current status on the ITS Standards Program.  In addition, the site contains resource documents, fact sheets, testing, deployment contacts, training and application area information as well as an interactive ITS Standards Forum.  The ITS Data Registry is a growing repository of elements of the ITS Standards.

The Architecture and Standards

The National ITS Architecture is a reference framework that spans all of these ITS standards activities and provides a means of detecting gaps, overlaps, and inconsistencies between the standards.  Standards Requirements, based on the Logical and Physical Architecture, provide a starting point for the standards development activities by identifying the applicable architecture flows and data flows to be standardized in the National ITS Architecture and the way in which the information is exchanged across those interfaces.

Standards Requirements have been allocated to standards development activities in the following organizations:

• AASHTO (American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials)
• ANSI (American National Standards Institute)
• ASTM (American Society for Testing and Materials)
• EIA/CEA (Electronics Industry Alliance/Consumer Electronics Association)
• IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers)
• ITE (Institute of Transportation Engineers)
• NEMA (National Electrical Manufacturers Association)
• SAE (Society of Automotive Engineers)

Select an organization above to examine a list of ITS Standards Activities that it leads.  Select one of these subsequent Standards Activities or Families of Standards Activities to see the corresponding architecture flows mapped to that standard.  Although each standards activity is allocated to a single lead SDO in this mapping, it should be noted that some of the standards activities are collaborative between multiple SDOs (e.g., the NTCIP Joint Steering Committee is comprised of representatives from AASHTO, ITE and NEMA).

For More Information

There are several excellent resources on the World Wide Web for those who want to learn more about ITS standards.  In addition to the USDOT ITS JPO's Standards Site, the ITS America Standards Home Page provides Access to the latest standards news relating to all aspects of ITS.

These general sources are supplemented by sites that provide additional detail for a particular standards area, such as communication between traffic management centers, Systems Network (CVISN).  The table below provides links to SDO home pages as well as some of those specific ITS Standards efforts.  Other organizations involved with ITS Standards development include the International Organization for Standards (ISO) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).