This Function shall be capable of providing the following facilities:<br/><br/>(1) The ability to collect Floating Car Data (FCD) and Extended Floating Car Data (XFCD) about Vehicles that are using the inter-urban road network.<br/>(2) The ability to collect the data as raw input from functionality within the Vehicles.<br/>(3) The raw input data shall be expected to contain location information, time and Vehicle status data.<br/>(4) The ability to process the collected data to provide actual traffic flow data, e.g. flow, speed, for the inter-urban road network, Vehicle status data, e.g. broken down, other road related data, e.g. rain, fog, slippery road, ice and to detect incidents.<br/>(5) As part of this processing, the ability to check the coherence and consistency of the data both for individual Vehicles and for the traffic as a whole in each segment of the inter-urban road network.<br/>(6) The ability to also check that the data it receives is actually coming from the Vehicle who's ID comes with it and that the safety behaviour of the Vehicle is acceptable.<br/>(7) If any of these checks fail, the ability for the data received for that Vehicle to be discarded, except if it is traffic flow data and the Vehicle is being driven safely.<br/>(8) The ability to pass the processed data to the incident management functionality for collation and to other traffic management functionality for use in managing the traffic using the inter-urban road network.<br/>(9) The ability to make all processed data anonymous so that the movement through the urban road network of specific Vehicles cannot be identified. <br/>
(a) continuously monitor for the arrival of the data flows containing the inter-urban floating car and any other data from vehicles;<br/>(b) when either of the floating car data flows in (a) arrive, process their contents to determine traffic flow data and check this and any other data provided by in-vehicle systems for their plausibility;<br/>(c) put the vehicle identity extracted from the data flows in (b) into the inter-urban fcd vehicle identity data flow and send it to the Monitor Inter-urban FCD/XFCD Source Vehicle function;<br/>(d) when as a result of (c) the inter-urban fcd error data flow is received, check to see if it includes an error indication;<br/>(e) if an error indication is found in (d) discard all the data provided by the vehicle, except that from which inter-urban traffic flow can be determined;<br/>(f) if the safety behaviour status for urban data flow is received in (a) containing a warning of unsafe behaviour, discard all of the data from the vehicle as it will not be representative of the majority of vehicles using the urban road network;<br/>(g) if the checks in (d) and (e) are satisfactory, plus there is no warning in (f), if the checks in (b) and (e) are satisfactory, collate and fuse the data to provide a coherent and consistent set, separating out the inter-urban traffic flow data, other data, e.g. slippery road, fog, rain, darkness, possible incidents and ice, for easy use by other functionality;<br/>(h) fuse the traffic flow data from all vehicles so that for example, data for the same segment of the inter-urban road network is aggregated and also fuse the data from the vehicle trip plans so that for example, the numbers of vehicle using or planning to use each segment of the inter-urban road network is calculated;<br/>(i) send the data produced in (h) to the Provide Inter-urban Traffic Data Management function in the data flow containing collected inter-urban vehicle data;<br/>(j) also send the inter-urban traffic flow data and any available data about unusual conditions, e.g. rain and low temperatures, to the Incident Detection function in the inter-urban XFCD for incident detection data flow.<br/>
