Resources

Advanced Transportation Controller (ATC)

The Advanced Transportation Controller (ATC) Standards are intended to provide an open architecture hardware and software platform that can support a wide variety of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) applications including traffic management, safety, security and other applications. The ATC Standards are being developed and maintained under the direction of the ATC Joint Committee (JC) which is made up of representatives from the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO), the Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE), and the National Electrical Manufacturers Association (NEMA).

The Advanced Transportation Controller Standard (ATC Standard) is one of the four standards of the ATC family of standards. The ATC Standard provides a powerful, on-street, computing platform for numerous ITS applications intersection control, ramp metering, data collection, safety, security and other applications. It uses a transportation controller architecture where the computational components of the controller reside on a single small printed circuit board (PCB), called the “Engine Board,” with standardized connectors and pinout. It is made up of a central processing unit (CPU), Linux operating system (O/S), memory, external and internal interfaces, and other associated hardware necessary to create an embedded transportation computing platform. The Engine Board plugs into a “Host Module” which supplies power and physical connection to the input/output (I/O) facilities of the controller. While the interface to the Engine Board is completely specified, the Host Module may be of various shapes and sizes to accommodate innumerable transportation controller designs and cabinet architectures. The ATC Standard works together with the Application Programming Interface (API) Standard to allow application programs to share the resources of the controller and the transportation field cabinet system.

Comments on the standard are welcomed at any time and are collected using the comment form and email it to Standards@ite.org. However, when the project/working group is active, then actions will be taken on comments received.

Other standards within the ATC program include the Model 2070 Standard, the ATC API, and the Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) Cabinet Standard.

Version History Table

Standard Name
Overall Status Under Development / Published / Superseded Version
Date
ATC 5201 Advanced Transportation Controller Standard v06B Maintenance Release in progress 2022 -TBD
ATC 5201 Advanced Transportation Controller Standard v06A
Published
01/12/18
ATC Standard 5.2b
Published
09/25/06