ASECAP - Projects - RCI

The RCI (Road Charging Interoperability) project, launched by the European Commission, aims to make it possible to carry out any road charging transaction in Europe with a single in-vehicle equipment.

ASECAP and its members participate in the project. The project started in June 2005 and has a 3-year duration.

The RCI project will develop an open, integrated framework enabling road charging interoperability at the technical (and related procedural) level based on the key existing and planned road charging deployments in Europe (AUTOPASS, EUROPPASS, LSVA, TELEPASS, TIS, TOLL COLLECT, VIA-T and VIA VERDE). It will implement and test this framework in field trials at six sites, namely Austria (EUROPPASS), France (TIS), Germany (TOLL COLLECT), Italy (TELEPASS), Spain (VIA-T) and Switzerland (LSVA). Tough currently not foreseen for budgetary reasons, RCI is ready to support additional test sites representing other key deployments in Europe.

RCI will exploit the results of earlier European research activities in the domain (such as CARDME, CESARE, PISTA and INITIATIVE) and use elements developed by concurrent initiatives that are working toward the same objective. It will also reflect the evolution towards open platforms, allowing future road charging platforms to be used for a range of other services.

The main work that will be conducted in the RCI project is as follows:

To describe the general framework in terms of use cases and interoperability requirements;
To define the framework in terms of the procedural context and the technical architecture;
To demonstrate on the networks of selected operators in Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Switzerland the ability to execute transactions in the context of the existing road charging systems, the ability to run other services on the same in-vehicle platform, the ability to use a single equipment between customer/user and operators/authorities, and the ability to produce road charging transaction data;
To propose type approval and certification process in terms of an overall framework, test plan and exemplary type approval.