Notes on InterTraffic Conference

RFIDSA's Vice Chairperson, Neil Mitchell, shared his insights about the InterTraffic Conference. 
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InterTraffic was held over 4 days this month from March 23rd – 26th in Amsterdam. The show runs every 2 years and has considerably expanded from the show 2 years ago (having almost tripled in size!). It is a broad based traffic event and not solely focused on RFID or security technologies. While some portions of the show are not relevant to MIKOH and the RFID Security Alliance there are significant key parts that are.

ITS (Intelligent Traffic Systems) and Cooperative Systems which are highly relevant took up 1/3 of the show and Safety and Infrastructure that had parts that were relevant and parts that were not took up another 1/3 of the show.

Attendance was mostly European but there were significant attendance from beyond including North and South America, Asia (including Russia and China), and Australia.

Major themes from the show were:
• Increased use of video based vehicle tracking (free flow, parking, security etc). Note: Clearly video based tracking has hugely varying read rates from 65%-95%) and if to be used as a revenue generating activity is often used in addition to a technology such as RFID to fill that significant gap (unless in a more controlled environment such as parking).
• Vehicle networking and traffic management using vehicle-to-vehicle communication (of information such as speed, time, GPS location etc). There was actually a live demo around Amsterdam of this technology. RFID tags on vehicles can be part of this solution but is likely to be used only if employed for other reasons beyond just this.

While the theme of security was present, it was mostly from the point of view of vehicle security (high level tracking and monitoring) and less so the detailed issues relating to tag security.

The show was generally, highly relevant for anyone involved in Automatic Vehicle Identification (e.g. Electronic Vehicle Registration, tolling, parking etc) and a very good meeting place for customers, partners and relevant industry bodies.