ITS Architecture for Canada Documentation

The architecture documents make up a comprehensive and critical resource listing the different components of ITS and the many connections that unite them into an overall framework for deployment. These documents offer thousands of pages of information to help in designing intelligent transportation systems. The entire suite of core architecture documents has been updated in 2009 in coordination with the Version 2.0 update.

Version 2.0 of the ITS Architecture for Canada is the direct result of inputs from the ITS community and represents a significant re-alignment with the current U.S. National ITS Architecture (Version 6.1). Transport Canada acknowledges the U.S. Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) for kindness in sharing their wealth of architectural material. Changes were incorporated into the physical and logical architectures, and several other key architecture definition documents for this version.

The ITS Architecture for Canada document set is listed below and is available as PDF files, which may be viewed using Acrobat Reader.

ITS Architecture for Canada Documents:

The architecture documents fall into the following categories:

User Services

This one Document consolidates the descriptions of all 37 current user services into a single document. If additional ITS user services are defined in the future, this document will be updated to include them.

The User Services document provides an overview of current ITS User Services.

Architecture Definition

There are four documents that provide architecture definition:

The Logical Architecture document is made up of three volumes:

• Description (Volume 1)
• Process Specifications (Volume 2)
• Data Dictionary (Volume 3)

These present a functional view of the ITS user services, contain diagrams that show processes and data flows among them, and define data elements, respectively.

The Physical Architecture document describes the transportation and communications layers resulting from the partitioning of the processes within the logical architecture, presents architecture flow diagrams that show data passing among physical subsystems, and provides characteristics and constraints on the data flows.

The Service Packages document expands upon the Service Package discussion in the Implementation Strategy by providing a comprehensive review of each of the Service Packages describing how Service Packages can be used to plan and implement integrated transportation systems customized to local needs.

Regional ITS Architecture Guidance (Version 2.0)

The Regional ITS Architecture Guidance for Canada: Developing, Using and Maintaining an ITS Architecture For Your Region (Version 1.0) is a guide for transportation professionals who are involved in the development, use, or maintenance of regional ITS architectures. The document describes a process for creating a regional ITS architecture with supporting examples of each architecture product. It describes a process for creating a regional ITS architecture with supporting examples of each product and discusses mainstreaming ITS into the planning and project development processes. This update expands upon the topics of Using and Maintaining a regional ITS architecture.