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In today's automotive industry, competitiveness necessitates ever more rapid and cost effective new product development. In order to achieve this, it is essential that designers and engineers have some frame of reference from which they can make a decision regarding the competitiveness of existing and future products. When used properly, benchmarking is an effective tool for accomplishing not only this, but also ensuring market leadership in almost any aspect of a company's business. This paper illustrates, by way of examples, how benchmarking can be used in a variety of situations in the automotive industry and for a number of purposes.

Various researches have shown those vehicles travelling at excessive speed are more likely to cause an accident. In UK, an estimated 1,200 fatalities per year on the roads can be attributed to inappropriate vehicle speed. It is believed that if it were possible to control vehicle speed within the legally accepted limits, on the road, the number and severity of these fatalities would be greatly reduced. Therefore, there is a need to develop methods of externally or remotely controlling or adapting vehicle speed limits. One method of affecting the necessary speed limits would be through the development of intelligent remote speed control system that employs the technologies of Intelligent Transport System that focuses on infrastructure - vehicle - infrastructure communication. An intelligent methodology is needed to integrate the technologies, the driver and the vehicle in order to start to address some of the concerns of deploying the systems.

During the last decade the complexity of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), has grown in terms of computer applications, functionality, communication technologies and specification. In recent times, some of these systems (e.g. fleet management systems, navigation systems, freight management systems, etc.) are well established in real-life applications, while others (e.g. vehicle-to-vehicle communication, collision avoidance systems) are in the final stages before wide spread deployment. Although individual ITS are in operation, an integrated architecture that consists of more than one of these systems has not been fully developed [1]. The first step for the development of such architecture will rely on the development of appropriate tools that will expedite the systems design process and move towards the implementation of the systems integration.

This paper will present the Truck Systems Concept Verifier, used as the integration platform for transport telematic technologies considered as important to the CVO industry in the UK. The results that are presented in this paper will provide some insight to the intelligent ICVO applications currently under development. Some of the technical and operational issues facing intelligent commercial vehicle operation were used as the basis for developing scenario based systems integration methodology for these technologies. The new method is based on matrix mapping with probabilistic weighting functions that enables an improved integrated systems functional description. The integration methodology is developed as a software routine that will form part of computer modeling and design framework for integrated transport telematics

The demands for effective and efficient management of commercial vehicles and freight transport have led to the increasing needs for sophisticated fleet management systems (FMS) for reducing the operation cost of commercial vehicle operation, improving custom service and asset management as well as maintaining the safety and security. The availability and declining costs of telecommunications and information technologies afford opportunities for using real-time information to achieve these targets and the emergence of internet technology make it possible to transfer updated real-time information through more widely available communication media. This paper introduces the web-based remote-access concept for the real-time information acquisition, which has been used to enhance functionality of a dynamic fleet management system.