Over 50 people attended a Workshop on Interoperability testing for ITS cooperative mobility systems on Thursday 17 November 2011, an event co-organised by ERTICO, ETSI and TNO. Taking place during the first ever ITS Plugtests™, it proved the great interest shown by the ITS community towards interoperability testing, an essential step towards the deployment of cooperative systems.

No deployment of cooperative systems will happen without interoperability. This message was fully endorsed within the ITS community gathered on the High Tech Automotive Campus of Helmond (NL) on Thursday 17 November 2011. Suppliers, research institutes, car manufacturers, associations, all of which have spent years of efforts working on cooperative systems, recognised the importance of interoperability testing in ITS.

“The set of systems that will be deployed will be safety, transaction and brand critical”, underlined Phil Pettitt, CEO of innovITS ADVANCE, a UK based ITS test bed. This means that all ITS stakeholders need interoperability. It was also highlighted by Gérard Segarra, Innovation leader at Renault Engineering Division: “As car manufacturers, we purchase products from technology suppliers, but before we purchase products, we want to be sure that they are interoperable and conforming”

This is the reason why ERTICO and ETSI joined forces to launch the first ITS Plugtests™ about Cooperative Systems, supported by the European projects DRIVE C2X and eCoMove. Hosted by TNO and the Dutch Integrated Testsite Cooperative Mobility (DITCM), the Plugtests™ allowed 14 ITS vendors to test, over a week, the interoperability of their implementations in face-to-face configurations. The outcomes of the Plugtests™ were very positive in terms of attendance and operational sequence of the test sessions, and are an invitation to the organisers and the participants to prepare new ITS Plugtests™ in the future.

From the initiative of ERTICO and ETSI to jointly organise a week of interoperability testing, also came the need to share the importance of the Plugtests™ with the ITS community at large. ERTICO, ETSI and TNO therefore co-organised the workshop on Cooperative Mobility Systems Interoperability Testing, to present to the audience the early but already very positive results of the Plugtests™ and explain how these results are beneficial for many stakeholders of the ITS Community.