The US Department of Transportation’s Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) Joint Program Office has released version 3.1 of its ITS Center-to-Center (C2C) Reference Implementation (RI) tool.
The C2C RI tool supports the efficient deployment of systems using C2C communications by providing a means to verify conformance to C2C standards. The C2C interface may be between two traffic management centers or any two centers that need to coordinate (regionally or locally) corridor management, arterial management, incident mitigation, and event management, for example.
Specifically, the C2C RI tool supports conformance testing for Traffic Management Data Dictionary (TMDD) v3.1 standard, and for National Transportation Communications for ITS Protocol (NTCIP) 2306 v01.69 Application Profile for XML Message Encoding and Transport in ITS C2C Communications standard. For more information on the latter, click here: www.standards.its.dot.gov/Standard/421.
The tool conducts conformance testing of the C2C interface of the system under test (SUT) in two different ways. First, it examines the interface description document to see if it conforms to the two standards mentioned above. Then, the RI tool tests the interface by communicating with the SUT. This communication consists of dialogs between the tool and the SUT.
The tool can test a wide range of expected and unexpected behaviors since it controls the sequence and contents of the protocol messages sent to the SUT. The tool implements test dialogs based on the user’s selection of needs and requirements.
Version 3.1 of the C2C RI tool includes several new features:
· An optional guided user mode for the graphical user interface
· Entity emulation for links, nodes, and center active verification
· A built-in test case data file editor
· The C2C RI acting as an owner center will now only return Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) error response codes of 500 when Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) encoding is being used, which is consistent with the SOAP standard.