The parties will focus on electronic toll collection, highway traffic management, telematics and intelligent urban parking in which Xerox has proficiency in back-end software and operations, predominantly in the Americas and Europe, while MHI has strength in front-end hardware and maintenance, predominantly in Japan and Asia.

The ITS offerings of Xerox and MHI complement one another. Xerox and MHI will seek to find opportunities in which their combined strengths will provide a better and more competitive offering for transportation authorities and operators around the world.

—Ken Philmus, senior vice president, Transportation Services, Xerox

In July, several Xerox transportation solutions and analytics innovations were demonstrated as part of the grand opening of Mcity, the University of Michigan’s one-of-a-kind test site for connected and automated vehicles. (Earlier post.) These Xerox solutions included:

• CloudParc technology to guide drivers to available parking spots using cameras and small computers mounted on traffic poles to track the availability of spaces and transmit the information to tablet devices within vehicles.

• Vehicle Passenger Detection PDF file System (VPDS) using video analytics to identify the number of occupants in a vehicle, which allows transportation and law enforcement agencies to monitor and enforce the use of High Occupancy Vehicle/High Occupancy Toll (HOV/HOT) lanes. This data is transmitted over a Dedicated Short Range Communications (DSRC) channel to signal to the driver if they are HOV/HOT qualified via a roadside sign and an in-vehicle display.

• Merge, a city-wide smart parking solution, to enable guided parking, predictive enforcement, meter and pay-by-cell management, and demand-based pricing—all layered with analytics to increase parking program efficiencies and reduce traffic congestion.