EIT Urban Mobility launches ISA FIT, an Intelligent Speed Assistance retrofit solution

Funded by EIT Urban Mobility, ISA FIT is a progressive new initiative focused on road safety enhancement that officially kicked off on Tuesday, 10 May 2022. POLIS, CTAG - Automotive Technology Center of Galicia, the City of Helmond, Eindhoven University of Technology, Tractebel Engineering, TN-ITS, and V-Tron are the partners responsible for the final on-site testing, results, and communication to make the project enforced by 2025.

Preventing speeding is one of the most effective ways to reduce traffic crashes, both in numbers and severity. Reducing the speed limits, particularly in urban areas, is a necessary step – but that measure is not enough by itself: infrastructure and vehicles matter, too.

Intelligent Speed Assistance (ISA) is one such measure and a promising one. The technology is available and its installation in all new vehicles has become mandatory in the EU, but practical questions remain. Project ISA FIT will deal with at least two of these, namely how to retrofit existing vehicles and how can we deploy such a system; of course, we cannot wait 20 years for the full renovation of the current fleets and we must promptly address all the practicalities of deploying ISA, especially from the side of the local and regional authorities in charge of the infrastructure.

Why can ISA FIT play a significant role to overcome speeding and traffic incidents caused by it?

Photo credit André Valkeman, Rob Voss www.robvoss.nl

ISA FIT aims to provide a solid all-in retrofit ISA solution for urban environments to speed up implementation for the benefit of drivers and other road users. 15 ISA vehicles will be evaluated in Helmond on the quality of the service, the driver acceptance, and behavioural outcomes within different use cases.

Meanwhile, European authorities will develop a strategy to scale up ISA implementation with the focus on cooperation on speed limit databases, deployment standards, and procurement strategies. At the end of the project, partners will launch a ready-to-market ISA retrofit product and deploy consultancy services.

The impact of ISA

ISA is one of the most promising Advanced Driving Assisting Systems (ADAS) that has a proven impact on speed reduction, environment, traffic safety, and comfort increase for drivers. ISA has therefore the potential to improve liveability in cities.

Many organizations and cities have been already working for years to speed up the deployment of ISA technology. As an example, the City of Helmond was one of the pioneers to launch the “ISA Manifesto” at the Polis Annual Conference in Manchester in 2018.

A major step toward large-scale rollout was taken with the revision of the General Safety Regulations. The European Parliament approved in 2019 the EC's proposal to make, among other things, ISA mandatory for new vehicles. The new regulation should then apply from 2022 onwards and to all new vehicle types, with a further extension to all new vehicles entering the European market from 2024.

Thanks to EU regulations, a wider variety of vehicles (cars, buses, trucks) will be equipped with ISA technology in the coming years. However, there are still challenges that stand in the way of unlocking the potential benefits: data availability, reliability of the service in different conditions and environments, as well as the trustworthiness of the market-ready (retrofit) systems.

ISA FIT's potential

ISA FIT wants to tackle the following challenges:

testing a retrofit ISA system in different urban conditions to achieve a more robust and market-ready product.
providing a framework or strategy for retrofit ISA deployment that focuses on digital and physical infrastructure, regulatory aspects, and procurement.

ISA FIT should lead to improved and sustainable ISA services which will offer more comfortable and safer driving for drivers, and also anyone living in a city without any negative side-effect or behavioural significant adaptation. In addition, the deployment of ISA will increase the safety and liveability in urban areas and the use of in-vehicle technology could be cost-saving if widely deployed in cities.

ISA FIT would like to align the cities’ demand on an EU scale so that the production and provision would become relevant for the industry. The efficiency of the ISA services will depend on the digital maps, geofencing, and onboard cameras for the provision of data to the end-users and on-speed data updates.

The brand-new initiative can provide new deployment insights for the involved industry, cities, and academia, and should lead to adequate consultancy and the creation of a market available product which can be used by cities to define their policies and reach their objectives.

More on the project

ISA FIT will run from May 2022 to December 2022 - Partners of the initiative are CTAG - Automotive Technology Center of Galicia, City of Helmond, Eindhoven University of Technology, Tractebel Engineering, POLIS, TN-ITS, and V-Tron.