The Danish Road Directorate, in co-operation with a local company TetraPlan, has developed and demonstrated a prototype of a new backbone for Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS). The new ITS backbone has overcome various barriers of incompatibility between the products of different vendors, which have been hindering the extension and technology transfer of traffic informatics systems. It combines the technologies of ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode) fibres and SCADA (Supervision, Control and Data Acquisition Systems). The author of this article argues that this new ITS backbone should be adopted as a de facto standard until deliberations over ITS architecture are complete. An appropriate standard must enable telematics applications to emphasise openness, flexibility, independence of supplier, and minimisation of software cost. Until a standard emerges for the telematics area, it is economically favourable to build on the standards developed for process control, such as the Manufacturing Message Standard (MMS) and SCADA systems, which are used largely as backbones for automating factories, chemical plants, and power plants. SCADA has several advantages for the production and maintenance of real-time software.
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