Regulated applications for the road transportation infrastructure: The case study of the smart tachograph in the European Union

The Digital Tachograph (DT) is an equipment intended for installation in road commercial vehicles to display, record, print, store and output automatically or semi-automatically details of the vehicle movement and details of certain periods of activity of the drivers. It is used in the European Union to check the driving times of drivers and enforce the legislation on social rules (rest period, driving time limits), in relation with the road safety objective of reducing the number of accidents and fatalities in the EU. Each driver is equipped with a personal card (s)he has to introduce in the tachograph to be personally identified. The DT is a very important application in Europe in the road transportation sector as it is obligatory to install a DT in commercial vehicles having a mass of more than 3,5 tonnes (in goods transport) and carrying more than 9 persons including the driver (in passenger transport). Thus this regulation impacts millions of vehicles. The legal and technical framework has been recently revised according to Council Regulation (EU) No. 165/2014, which introduced support for wireless communication, positioning by Global Positioning Satellite Systems (GNSS) and new security measures for the DT system. This led to the revision of the existing DT technical specifications to a new set of specifications discussed with law enforcers, manufacturers and service providers. The new technical specifications are hundreds of pages long and they cover many different technical aspects. The goal of this paper is to describe the key elements of the new design of the smart tachograph and how it addresses the limitations of the existing DT.