CVIS Requirements Open Workshop
Volvo offices, Brussels, Belgium
18-19 October 2006
CVIS has reached the stage of definition of its use cases, user needs and system requirements. To validate these interim results, the project organised its first Open Workshop on 18 and 19 October 2006 in Brussels, inviting stakeholders external to the project.
Nearly 80 people participated in the workshop from the cooperative systems community (vehicle manufacturers; automotive, traffic system and digital map suppliers; road operators; government authorities), and even the banking sector, which presence is significant of the commercial interest already sensed in cooperative systems. Other EU-funded research projects like SafeSpot and Coopers were represented to ensure the mechanisms of close cooperation established between those liaison projects and CVIS.
The workshop was a great opportunity for CVIS to raise awareness about the project and to meet new and interesting stakeholders. The latters provided some excellent input on CVIS use cases and requirements, influencing the direction of cooperative systems development in Europe. Feedback from the workshop will help set the standards needed for full interoperability for all vehicle makes and all equipped roadside infrastructure.
The first day was dedicated to general presentations about CVIS and its sub-projects:
The second day started with break out sessions for each of the CVIS sub-projects. The afternoon session was dedicated to feedback and conclusions from the morning break outs, and an interactive questions and answers session with the CVIS consortium members panel:
Participants reflected on on how the final product (CVIS communication "box") will look like, and how will carmakers sell it. Should it be consumer or end-user driven or driven by the services offered, while the market will be very different depending on which of the applications?
How to make it clear to the public authorities what CVIS could mean for them? How to make ther end user see the benefit for him? The focus should be on why it is beneficial and not so much what is beneficial. In other words, everybody agreed that the focus should be on user needs and the complexity of the technology should be "invisible" to the consumer.
It is difficult to apprehend now what CVIS will deliver at the end of four years; it will definitely not be a market-ready product, but a "prototype" that should at least help raise public awareness and convince users. Likewise with the early stages of the internet, the whole range of possibilities ten years from now is hard to define; many more user needs will come afterwards. The objectives will remain but the way to deliver them will change, but in the end what will matter to the end consumer is not so much the technology used but its price.
The Consortium is now analysing the input received from the workshop and will include some of the feedback into the project Consolidated Use Case and System Requirements. We understand that the exercise now is one of scoping, to identify the core functionality, to select the highest priority that should be the driving criteria to move towards the next stage, i.e. architecture.
We were very encouraged by the amount of new feedback that we have received. We believe that including this input in the document would be extremely beneficial, would strengthen the image of CVIS as a transparent project and would improve the chances that the final technical solution for CVIS would meet users’ needs, and therefore lead to deployment and market development.
The next open workshop on reference architecture will take place in May 2007; members of the Forum will be consulted on the proposed dates. If you would like to be informed about the next CVIS open workshops, and receive regular updates on CVIS developments, please register for the CVIS Forum.
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