RSF 119: Advancing Universal ID Through Demonstration of Enabling Technologies - HP-CMV 21

Abstract RSF 119: Advancing Universal ID Through Demonstration of Enabling Technologies – HP-CMV 21 For many years, leaders in the advancement of commercial vehicle monitoring and enforcement technologies have recognized the extensive benefits that could be realized from having an electronic identifier on every commercial vehicle. Unfortunately, there has been no significant progress toward this goal in the past ten years. Part of the reasoning behind the lack of action has been the inability to decide on a specific technology to accomplish the identification task. There has been a reluctance to mandate and deploy a simple, low-cost, RFID solution with the knowledge that such technology may be superseded by newer, more capable technologies within a few years. The question of which technology should ultimately be selected and deployed for Universal ID has now been answered. The concept of “Connected Vehicles” (CV) has created a vision for the future in which every vehicle (commercial and non-commercial) will be equipped with on-vehicle technology capable of communicating with other vehicles (V2V), with the infrastructure (V2I), and with other elements of the transportation system (V2X). This national convergence to a single technology for vehicle-infrastructure communication provides the opportunity to finally get “off the dime” and make dramatic progress in the pursuit of Universal ID. Substantial progress has also been made regarding simple, low-cost RFID technology. Such technology is in widespread use for toll collection, border crossings, and other applications, and the cost for the on- vehicle technology is now in the range of 50 cents per tag. This creates a significant, near-term opportunity to achieve the goals of Universal ID. By demonstrating fully functional, end-to-end electronic screening of commercial vehicles based on these technologies, this project will help FMCSA identify and answer the key questions that must be addressed in order to realize the enormous potential of Universal ID. The objectives of this project are to: • Deploy CV technology on selected trucks and at selected roadside screening locations. • Deploy low-cost RFID technology on selected trucks and at selected roadside screening locations. • Integrate these technologies into the Kentucky Automated Truck Screening (KATS) system and demonstrate fully functional, end-to-end electronic screening of equipped trucks. • Evaluate the performance of each technology in terms of its accuracy and reliability. • Compare the cost and performance of these technologies with currently utilized OCR-based technologies. • Document the benefits resulting from the lower cost and higher accuracy of these technologies, and extrapolate these benefits for a widespread or nationwide deployment. • Identify critical issues and questions that must be addressed in order to achieve widespread or nationwide deployment of these technologies.