The "Special Work Plan for Large-scale Facilities and Equipment Renewal in the Transportation Field of Shanghai (2024-2027)" has been issued, proposing to promote the integration of vehicle and road cloud, and to renovate ETC gantry system RSU and other equipment. RSU is the abbreviation for Road Side Unit, which communicates with on-board units in the ETC system to implement electronic toll collection. At present, more than 8,700 sets of intelligent RSUs have been deployed in various places, and brokerage firms predict that the largest scale will be about 910 million yuan in 2025.
On August 8th, "Science and Technology Innovation Board Daily" reported that today, the "Special Work Plan for Large-scale Facilities and Equipment Renewal in the Transportation Field of Shanghai (2024-2027)" (referred to as the "Plan") has been issued, which mentions promoting the digital transformation of transportation infrastructure, speeding up the digital transformation of highway and waterway transportation infrastructure, building a digital perception network, an intelligent control system and a networked service system, changing the traditional infrastructure mode, paying more attention to intensification, saving and utilization of resources, and significantly improving the carrying capacity of transportation infrastructure by consuming fewer resources.
Furthermore, the Plan pointed out that it is necessary to promote the integration of vehicle and road cloud, renovate ETC gantry system RSUs and other equipment, and achieve interaction and coordination with vehicle information.
The so-called RSU is the abbreviation for Road Side Unit in English, which is installed on the roadside in the ETC electronic toll collection system. It communicates with on-board units (OBU, ON Board Unit) through special short-range communication technology to achieve vehicle identification and electronic toll collection.
In fact, the function of RSU is far more than that. According to the research report of Guolian Securities in July, this equipment, in addition to obtaining the vehicle model and calculating the tariff in the ETC system, also has the following two application scenarios:
1) Road condition intelligent monitoring: RSU directly receives messages from the on-board unit (OBU) of the vehicle, such as speed, position, turning, etc., analyzes the data and estimates the traffic flow density at the intersection. When abnormal accidents occur to vehicles or roads, RSU captures the information and uploads it to the edge node or datacenter for processing in real time, and releases it to the vehicle equipped with the on-board terminal that is about to drive to the anomalous section. This information can also be used as direct data for adjusting traffic signal lights in order to optimize the flow of vehicles.
2) Expand the scope of vehicle perception: RSU can play an important role in complex traffic environments. RSU receives and analyzes road-side event messages (RSI) and road-side safety messages (RSM), enabling the vehicle to "see" vehicles and pedestrians behind obstacles at intersections, and not be affected by weather factors, further improving traffic safety performance.
Why is it necessary to renovate RSUs and other equipment? From the perspective of the RSU relationship network, this unit is not only connected with on-board units and the datacenter, but also a hub node in the entire signal transmission process, and is an important component of the vehicle and road cloud integrated system at the roadside.
Source: China Mobile Research Institute - 5G Base Station Type RSU White Paper
Roadside equipment is accelerating its development.
In the current hot construction of "vehicle and road cloud integration" in China, various aspects of layout and promotion of roadside infrastructure have been implemented:
On July 17th, Changchun, the "Automobile City", announced the launch of the construction of "vehicle and road cloud integration", planning to invest 1.27 billion yuan in the next three years, comprehensively creating typical demonstration application scenarios such as transportation hubs, urban roads, expressways, and highways. During the pilot period, the city will build 1,400 5G base stations, and the coverage rate of RSUs in the area will reach 96%, and the signal light interconnection rate will reach 99%.
On July 2nd, the preparation of the project proposal for Beijing's new type of vehicle and road cloud integrated infrastructure construction project began public bidding. The bid announcement shows that the main contents of the construction project to be prepared include the "road" and "network" parts. The content of the "road" includes roadside digital infrastructure such as multifunctional poles, communication channels, and roadside intelligent perception devices and edge computing units for vehicle and road cloud integration.
In July of this year, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology stated that a total of 17 national intelligent networked vehicle test areas will be built, and the number of intelligent RSUs deployed on roads in various places has exceeded 8,700 sets. Judging from the market scale, according to the forecast of Guolian Securities, the scale of road-side units is expected to be nearly 10 billion yuan due to the construction of vehicle and road cloud. With the gradual landing of intelligent networked pilot projects, the overall scale of the first batch of pilot cities is expected to be close to 100 billion yuan, and the largest scale of roadside units in 2025 will be about 910 million yuan. By 2030, the maximum scale is about 37.8 billion yuan.