For almost a decade R&D on Road Transport Telematics (RTT) has been going on at the European level. The emphasis is now changing towards harvesting promising results by implementing RTT systems and creating RTT services. However, from an economics point of view, often European-scale markets are required in order to become finacially interesting, while as seen from traffic operators and end-users cross-border continuity and integration of services are success factors. Therefore architecture frameworks are needed to allow for those requirements. Since the early nineties the European Commission has supported projects and taskforces dealing with aspects of system architectures. Now, in the light of similar developments in USA and Japan, it is time to extend those building blocks into a flexible, European system architecture. This will help allow the private sector to create new, viable markets, make RTT implementation more effective for traffic authorities and make services more attractive for end-users.
Abstract