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This PATH Research Report covers the (Vehicle-Infrastructure Integration) VII California Development and Deployment (Task Order 5217) efforts from October 2005 – December 2007. Because TO 5217 is followed by the continuation TO 6127, it is a compendium of very applications-oriented research to date as well as a final report to TO 5217.It is organized to impart the very specific and generally very pragmatic implementation details first, beginning with an introduction (Section 1), description of VII hardware, general network and installation (Section 2), then progressing to a more detailed description of the network and operating software (Section 3) and finally to applications in development and prospective applications (Section 4). Because it is not yet a final report but rather a ‘research in progress’ report, it does not comprehensively address every task in the VII California family of task orders; specifically, several of the applications described in Section 4 are represented as works in progress (as they are at this writing), and the on-ramp metering study is not yet reported. Again, the purpose, of this report is to provide the reader with an understanding of how VII California was implemented.

Each year in the United States over 450,000 large trucks are involved in crashes, resulting in about 5000 fatalities and 120,000 injuries. Significantly, truck driver error is a major causal factor to truck-involved crashes. This points toward onboard monitoring as a promising means to encourage good driving behavior, it would recognizing and provide necessary feedback to correct self-induced hazardous driving situations. This is the basis for our past prototype development effort, which has produced under Task Orders 5509 and 6609 a suite of hardware on a Freightliner Century Class.This suite allows for online measurement of a set of driving characteristics which are indicators of unsafe driving behavior, with feedback given in real time to the driver, and offline to the carrier (and ultimately, back to the driver). Under this Task Order, we extended our work to detail a Field Operational Test. While that FOT began with 15 trucks, the work undertaken was expanded at US DOT’s request to consider additional teammates and a scope of over 200 trucks where the FOT could be collateral compared to the naturalistic data collection that could be accrued. We describe the original SOW, some of the transforming work in-between, then the finally-conceived FOT which in the end was submitted but not awarded to the PATH-Caltrans team.