Standards

Establishing regional (and national) standards for exchanging information among ITS deployments is important not only from an interoperability point of view, but it also reduces risk and cost since a region can select among multiple vendors for products and applications. Standards allow competition, create better products, and lower prices. Use of standards can also limit product obsolescence and extend the effective life of an ITS investment.

A key to the success of ITS in the Bay Area lies in the ability to exchange information between systems. To be able to do this, however, requires the use of communications protocol that can be understood at each end of the transmission. Common protocols, such as NTCIP and eXtensible Markup Language (XML) are required standards needed to exchange information with major regional projects in the Bay Area. Additionally, other required standards such as those for location referencing where all systems can comprehend each other’s location referencing system are necessary.

The Bay Area ITS Architecture includes relevant and recommended standards for information exchange (see Standards by Data Flow below) for most types of ITS projects.  The standards in the ITS Architecture serve as a reference for how the interconnections operate for most types of ITS projects.  They are not technology specific and meant to provide a functional overview of the interconnections. However, agency sponsors should be aware that in some instances, there may be funding requirements or regional policies that mandate use of project-specific standards.

Standards for Major Regional Projects in the Bay Area (Required)

Standards by Data Flow (All Projects, Recommended)

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