Project News: FESTA presents new Field Operational Test methodology

Date: 13 May 2008

The FESTA (Field opErational teSt supporT Action) project, in which ERTICO – ITS Europe is one of the project leaders, is a 6-month support action entirely funded by the European Commission Information Society and Media, and coordinated by Centro Ricerche Fiat (CRF). The project started in November 2007 and will officially run until 4 June 2008.

The FESTA consortium has put together a Field Operational Test (FOT) Handbook. The main purpose of the Handbook is to provide guidelines for the conduction of FOTs. It walks the reader through the whole process of planning, preparing, executing, analysing and reporting a FOT, and it gives information about aspects that are especially relevant for a study of this magnitude, such as administrative, logistics, legal and ethical issues. Furthermore, the handbook should serve as a common basis for the implementation of all future European field operational tests on ICT-based vehicle systems, nomadic device based systems, and cooperative systems.

Mr Fabrizio Minarini, project officer at the Directorate General Information Society & Media reminded participants of the FOT objectives and gave an overview of future European Commission calls related to Field Operational Tests and the currently selected projects.  Presentations by the FESTA consortium focused on various aspects of a FOT, such as different types of ICT functions, performance indicators, experimental procedures, data acquisition and storage, robust statistical procedures, cost-benefit analysis, implementation plan as well as legal and ethical issues. Around 100 experts representing major stakeholders in Europe with an interest in FOT expressed their views on the developed methodology. A lively dialogue between the participants followed the presentations and insightful questions were addressed to the consortium.

The meeting ended with a panel session in which the coordinators of the currently selected FOT projects (TeleFOT, EuroFOT and FOT-Net) presented their views on the FESTA methodology and how it should be applied in their respective FOT activities. FOT-NET, which is a support action coordinated by ERTICO, will act as the European networking platform to ensure that all FOT activities at EC and at national levels will use the proposed FOT methodology in a coherent manner.  It will serve as a reference for the application of the FESTA methodology and will inform partners of any changes suggested by FOT stakeholders.

The FESTA consortium will finalise the handbook before the official closing date on June 4th taking into account the valuable feedback received at the meeting. A draft version of the handbook as well as all workshop presentations are available at www.festaproject.eu.

For more information about the project, please contact the project coordinator Mr Gianfranco Burzio at gianfranco.burzio@crf.it.

For more information about FOT-Net, please contact Mr Maxime Flament, ERTICO’s Head of Sector for Safety & Security at m.flament@mail.ertico.com.