THE GCM CORRIDOR--SHOWING COMPLIANCE WITH THE NATIONAL SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE

As one of the four priority corridors originally established by the U.S. Congress under the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act, the Gary-Chicago-Milwaukee (GCM) Corridor has been the scene of numerous intelligent transportation systems (ITS) projects. Many of these projects have been implemented, while others are under implementation. Concurrent with these efforts has been the development of the National System Architecture (NSA) for ITS. To maintain compatibility with this architecture, a study was undertaken to develop a systems architecture for the GCM Corridor. One of the basic design criteria was compliance with the NAS. This paper reviews the requirements for the national architecture and how they have been applied to the GCM Corridor. Specifically, areas addressed include compliance with nationally accepted standards including those of the National Transportation Communications ITS Protocol (NTCIP) and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), detailing of data flows to ensure data availability by information service providers, and detailing of functionality within modules/control systems to comply with the national architecture. Other areas to be addressed include definition of market packages and the transportation/communication layers to be in compliance with the NSA. It is proposed that the resulting description of compliance with the NSA could be used as the basis for other projects in the United States to demonstrate the same compliance.