What should be well understood in the DATEX II specification environment is that DATEX II is a set of specifications that deals with the modeling of information content related to road and travel information aimed at communication between Traffic Control Centres, Traffic Information Centres and Service Providers. These parties exchange information in order to be aware of the real-time conditions of the road network and to support coordinated and collaborative traffic management operations between their centers.
The DATEX II payload content specifications have been standardized by CEN as the TS / EN 16157 family series. Some specifications are standardized as CEN TS or EN based on their level of maturity. This information is well defined at https://datex2.eu/datex2/about.
In order to implement data exchange between centers, in addition to the content structure, the general exchange specification must also be addressed. The Exchange level specification supporting DATEX II version 1.0 and 2.0 was limited to a very basic functionality level, which mainly supported the so-called Information Delivery Business Scenario, aimed at supporting the delivery of information between a supplier and its clients. In addition to the need for a more reliable, timely, and error-proof specification, the need for data delivery in other business scenario use cases, such as Traffic Management Plan activation workflow, led to the design of various functionalities. An example of such a functionality is triggering processing requests to activate external services through processing capabilities in other centers. This business scenario is called Collaborative ITS Services or CIS.
Today, the 2020 Exchange specification is fully available and supports both Data Delivery and the CIS Business Scenario that supports the DATEX II version 3 payload specification. After a first “Exchange 2018” version, the current Exchange 2020 specification is available on the DATEX II Academy (see Exchange User Guide at https://docs.datex2.eu/exchange/2020/userguide/)
The Exchange 2020 specification is compatible with the ongoing standardization process, which is supported by a joint CEN and ISO action to deliver 2 different standards.
The first set of specifications is “CEN ISO TS 19468 – Intelligent transport systems — Data interfaces between centers for transport information and control systems — Platform independent model specifications for data exchange protocols for transport information and control systems”. This TS, released in October 2019, is fully compatible with “Exchange 2018”, but will be soon superseded by the current revision which aims at fulfilling all features and supporting the full Platform Specific Model specification, both for Data Delivery and CIS. These are being addressed as “CEN ISO TS 14827-4 – Intelligent transport systems – Data interfaces between centers for intelligent transport systems – Part 4: Data interfaces between centers for Intelligent transport system (Profile B)”. This second TS will fully specify the interfaces for web services according to the Exchange 2020 SOAP Web Services specification (including all detailed interfaces and data declarations).
To learn more about this topic, please refer to the Exchange Specification documentation link at https://docs.datex2.eu/exchange/2020/index.html.