Promotion of Open Specifications and Standards in Europe
Across Europe national, regional and local authorities are tasked with encouraging more sustainable patterns of travel to meet the EU’s greenhouse gas emissions targets in addition to addressing more local issues such as Air Quality Management Areas. At the same time public sector budgets are being cut due to the tight economic conditions whilst public authorities are required to deliver more for less.  It is imperative that cost effective solutions must be found in these challenging times. 

Urban Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) are a key element in the delivery of sustainable transport policies at the local level and are therefore important for developing EU promoted Urban Mobility Plans and the wide range of related measures to address congestion, safety and accessibility. ITS systems can be used to encourage and maintain more sustainable patterns of travel and reduce environmental impacts through prioritising the highway for public transport, walking and cycling, better
management of the networks to reduce congestion, and through providing multimodal travel information to enable travellers to make informed choices. 

ITS is an area of rapid development with many systems and services being offered to local authorities.  However, issues which constrain the effectiveness of their application to develop sustainable transport policies relate to a lack of open specifications and standards.  This makes it difficult for less experienced authorities to introduce coherent and cost effective ITS systems, leads to supplier dependency, and stifles the scale of the market for innovation. 

POSSE (Promotion of Open Specifications and Standards in Europe) aims to encourage the use of ITS for sustainable urban policies through the transfer of good practice from UK and German experience to follower cities elsewhere in Europe and to support the development of appropriate Europe-wide open specifications and standards.
The UK’s Urban Traffic Management and Control (UTMC) specifications based on open international standards were demonstrated in 2000 in four towns including Reading. Ongoing development overseen by the UTMC Development Group (UDG) of public and private stakeholders has led to over 100 implementations in the UK. OCA is an association of 28 German, 5 Swiss and 3 Austrian towns who are working on the promotion of open standards. Open standard discussions will involve the development of ownership and build on existing EC initiatives such as the FRAME ITS architecture.

The project will be led by Reading with the support of UDG and OCA as knowledge sharing partners. The follower cities/regions will benefit from knowledge transfer and promote POSSE at a regional and national level in their countries. The project will deliver implementation plans which set out how open systems and specifications will be implemented and assist the follower cities delivering their environment policy objectives.