Hello everybody, my name is Yukihiro Tsukada. First of all, I would like to welcome you not only as our guests here today, but also as friends and colleagues. Today carries-on the series of symposiums with Smartway 2007 that began on Sunday(2007, October 14), and continued from this morning. In addition, the Japan Society of Civil Engineers will open their symposium tomorrow afternoon. These three symposiums in a short period represent an excellent opportunity for us to meet colleagues and exchange ideas. I would like to talk briefly about the details of these event courses;.
Last week, The World Congress on ITS, which concluded in Beijing, has meant many people from Europe and America directly and indirectly involved with ITS have joined us in Asia. This represents a best opportunity for us all. We here in Japan have researched and developed a variety of technologies, some of which were demonstrated at the National Institute for Land and Infrastructure Management in 2006 at Tsukuba-City. In addition, some of these technologies have also been tested in trials on public roads. We decided to hold these symposiums so that researchers from Japan involved with these technologies could take advantage of this wonderful chance to discuss their work with their international colleagues. Actually, the idea of holding this weekfs events was conceived considerably prior to the Beijing event, one year ago in London. While at that time we did not decide specifically on the details of this weekfs AHS symposiums, we did at least agree to use the opportunity of people gathering for the Beijing event to hold post-congress meetings. With this in mind, we began preparations for a series of events for researchers from around the world that would focus on the efforts of the AHS Research Association members, and also hopefully the work done in the public road trials. This weekfs symposiums starting Sunday are the culmination of these preparations.
First of all, I would like to express my gratitude to the members of the AHS Research Association, to our guests from AHS related companies, and indeed all attendees from AHS fields for making these events possible. Your free and frank exchange of views helped make yesterdayfs symposium a great success. We heard lots of opinions; some words of praise and some words of criticism. I would encourage everyone here today to express their opinions in a similarly candid manner.
As we heard from the Executive Director, we have come very close to achieving one of our targets, but in other areas there is still a lot of research to be carried-out, while in others much improvement is required. In the panel discussion in the morning session we were fortunate to hear from professional racing driver Mr. Nakajima. What was apparent in these and other discussions is that the final concept should be based on user-specifications. In other words, we have to work to achieve the specifications the user accepts. To achieve this goal, we are establishing a variety of tele-communication and related technologies with specifications that reflect the requirements of the user. However, if we consider ease-of-use for the driver, I think we can agree that there are still aspects of the technologies that must be refined and improved. Perhaps it is an awareness of this that brought many of you here to AHS symposiums today. I hope you all give this point your serious consideration and would like to hear your opinions.
Also today, we will be conducting a demonstration or introducing the results of public road trials. But of course we donft intend to stop at testing; the mission of AHS researchers is to find the best way to transfer the technology from testing to actual use on the public roads. The technological support we are receiving from members of the AHS Research Association is a testimony to this shared mission, as is the support we are receiving from a number of different areas. We would like to thank everyone for their help and request their continued support.
As we heard at yesterdayfs opening ceremony from Tokyo Metropolitan Expressway Chairman, Mr. Koji Hasegawa, and also from the Executive Director, and as I am sure we will be hearing from Professor Akaba, the Sangubashi curve AHS field tests were a major success, with the accident reduction effect maintained at between 70% to 80% levels for approximately these three years. The person responsible for managing this road, Chairman Mr. Hasegawa said gThis is extremely goods newsh. It also gave a wonderful boost to people such as myself as Director of the ITS Policy and Program Office on hearing of the truly impressive results that this trial was producing; its shows the fundamental positive results that ITS technology is capable of achieving.
The future will see us pursuing improvements in the two key words that were discussed separately in this morningfs session; gsafetyh and genvironmenth. If we consider the needs of the general public and of society in general, then we can clearly see how important these two words are. Up until to present, unquestionably AHS research has focused primarily on gsafetyh. However, if we consider matters from genvironmentalh
perspective, we can see that a variety of AHS research themes and individual technologies relate to environmental issues. Moreover, there are many areas in which AHS could contribute to environmental conservation.
Today, we will introduce in detail the results of research conducted by the AHS Research Association over a long period of time, and we hope you find them interesting. I am looking forward to hearing about them myself. Finally, as we mentioned in the morning session, our goal is to stimulate discussion and debate. When they began to prepare for these symposiums a year ago we had to start from scratch. Many researchers from companies and related fields have expended considerable effort to get us to the point where these symposiums were possible. The fact that we have been able to hold these symposiums is a testimony to the time and energy they invested. In addition to todayfs main displays and discussions, we have prepared display area for you to inspect in the lobby four vehicles and at downstairs. We hope you will all take the time to take a look and discuss with your colleagues the technologies and themes on-show today. That concludes my greetings, thank you for your attention, and I hope you enjoy the rest of todayfs symposium. |
