TN-ITS (the Transport Network ITS ERTICO innovation platform) seeks to enhance cooperation with different actors to develop and promote its technical specification for the exchange of updates of road attributes between road authorities and map & service providers across Europe. Its mission is to improve digital map quality by swiftly incorporating changes in road data from a reliable and trusted source.
Recently, TN-ITS has collaborated with academia, specifically with the University College of Leuven Limburg (UCLL). Last spring, Jarne Vandeneynde and Zabiullah Sahebzada, two associate degree students in Computer Science, presented a technical framework for displaying TN-ITS data from multiple European road authorities as part of their Graduate final project. Their study case focused on illustrating the number of alterations in maximum speed limits.
The developed framework uses Python code to download and validate XML files offered by the Flemish, Dutch, and Finnish TN-ITS services, which contain relevant information on maximum speed limits. Afterwards, this data is loaded into an SQLite database and used by Django, a web development framework, to create a user-friendly web application. The result is an interactive dashboard that allows users to easily view and explore maximum speed limit data in different countries and during specific periods directly sourced from the road authorities.
This new dashboard represents a step towards gaining better insights into the status of TN-ITS services across Europe, providing a valuable tool to examine how these services have operated in the past.
There is potential for further progress, such as incorporating additional countries, supporting more complex (geospatial) queries, and integrating the visualisation into the TN-ITS web page. These opportunities present an exciting challenge for other students.
The developed dashboard is in the process to be released.