International cooperation

Leveraging the operations and results of Field Operational Tests through international cooperation...

Previous experience in Europe, US, and Japan has shown that Field Operational Tests are an excellent way to raise awareness, collect real data, and enhance the take-up of ICT solutions. Field Operational Tests have also proved to be a powerful tool to gain insight into the way new functions and systems suit the user when operated in the real context and for a sufficient long time to have statistically sound data.

The results of these tests are helping business leaders to make informed decisions about the market introduction or improvements of the systems. Also, they enable policy makers to establish the right policy framework for deployment of these systems, via market-driven approach, incentives or mandatory fitting of certain types of intelligent vehicle systems.

Field Operational Tests are indeed not a new activity for public authorities, e.g. many tests on ISA/SpeedAlert have been carried out within national research programs in Sweden, UK, The Netherlands, Denmark, Belgium and France. There is now a growing need to incorporate Field Operational Tests into a common European framework.

Field Operational Tests represent a big opportunity to test together new promising technologies and learn from each other and make them more comparable. Often, international standards have to be applied for these tests,  in order to guarantee interoperability and scalability of the technologies. This is easier to realize in an international collaborative effort than in a purely national activity.