Why Use TPEG?
What is TPEG?
TPEG (Transport Protocol Experts Group) is a format for telematics data. TPEG provides a standardized method for the delivery of many kinds of traffic and travel information that is language-independent and compact. It uses a variety of ways to reference locations, and is extensible in this area. Although its main use is for automobiles, TPEG is extensible and can be used by many kinds of applications. TPEG is coordinated and controlled by the Travelers Information Services Association. Visit the TISA website for more details on TPEG. The TPEG standard contains information on traffic events, traffic flow, fuel, parking, and weather.
How does the INRIX TPEG Service differ from INRIX Connected Services?
INRIX Connected Services
The INRIX Connected Services APIs provide sophisticated traffic, incident, weather, and other data that can be tailored for a vehicle’s location and intended route. Data for current and predicted conditions for locations, roads, or pre-defined geographic areas are obtained through HTTP requests that can be tailored for a vehicle’s location and destination. Data is returned in the form of XML, where each returned XML document contains all of the information needed to process or display the data. This approach is stateless, which is different from TPEG, which returns incremental data, as explained next.
INRIX TPEG Service
The TPEG Service is similar to Connected Services in that vehicle-specific information is requested and returned. However, the TPEG Service is able to minimize the amount of data that is sent back to the vehicle by:
- Sending only data that has changed from the previous time that TPEG data was requested. This means that the software that receives the data must keep track of the current state of the data and make changes to it when new data is received.
- Having the ability to return traffic data for a route.
- Using Location Referencing to efficiently store traffic flow data over several TMCs or metric offsets.
Comparison
| Feature | INRIX Connected Services | INRIX TPEG Services |
| State or stateless | Stateless. Complete data is always sent. | Has state. Incremental data from last update is sent. |
| Format | XML (More human-readable) | Binary (More compact) |
| Routes | Can return some information on routing | Can return traffic data along a route |
| Locations | Returns traffic data in a variety of location types (rectangular, circular, geography, etc.) | Returns traffic data around the client location and destination. Can return data for metric offsets and off-TMCs. |
Why Use the INRIX TPEG Connect service?
The INRIX TPEG Connect service is a platform that serves TPEG data. It communicates with both a customer back-end server that authenticates vehicles, and with vehicles themselves. It delivers the data using TPEG over IP (over the Internet), thereby removing the significant constraints of traditional traffic broadcast delivery formats such as RDS-TMC. The TPEG Connect service is designed to help consumers save on connectivity costs by ensuring only the most location-relevant real-time information is delivered to the vehicle or the consumer’s mobile device. This is particularly important across Europe where pre-paid data plans are common and data roaming fees can be extremely high. Although currently used primarily for vehicles, the TPEG Connect service can also be used to serve TPEG data to applications running on smartphones, tablets, and portable navigation devices. The TPEG Connect service currently supports:
- TFP 1.0 (traffic flow and predictions) and TEC 3.0 (incidents)
- Compression and encryption
- Binary format
- Guided and unguided scenarios
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