The National Transportation Communication for ITS Protocol (NTCIP) for transportation interoperability

Today's transportation networks are not interoperable and are not integrated to provide intermodal services as stipulated by the national transportation policy. The existing transportation infrastructure suffers from a lack of standards and protocols that are needed to tie together fragmented transportation subsystems. This lack of deployable standards and protocols has been a major problem for transportation management professionals for many years. However, public sector users, private sector manufacturers, and systems integrators in the transportation field have marshaled their resources to develop an open-standards based communications protocol. The paper describes the development efforts and the implications of the National Transportation Communications for ITS Protocol (NTCIP) and resulting interoperability for transportation applications. It discusses the framework of the NTCIP family of protocols. This emerging communications protocol standard is based on the Open Systems Interconnection Reference Model (OSI-RM) of the International Standards Organization (ISO). The family of protocols are based on layering concepts to keep the protocols simple and, more importantly-open. The NTCIP family of protocols attempts to meet the varied communications needs of the existing low speed transportation infrastructure and prepares the transportation industry for evolving to interoperable intelligent transportation systems (ITS).