Development of Integrated Intelligent Transportation Systems

The development of individual intelligent transportation systems (ITS) that operate well independently is not sufficient to meet the growing transportation needs of urban areas. To realize the true potential of ITS, systems such as freeway management systems, transit scheduling and dispatch systems, signal control systems, emergency computer-aided dispatch systems, and even construction scheduling systems must be integrated to allow for coordinated regional decision making. The formidable task of realizing integrated ITS (IITS) must often be accomplished by various municipal systems, most with little or no automation, and several organizational bodies that attempt to coordinate these efforts into a comprehensive regional network. Each of these organizations and systems has its own set of objectives, and these objectives may be noncommensurate and conflicting. Regional integration allows the systems to share information, allowing transportation officials to manage the entire regional transportation system. A sound regional architecture must be developed to guide developers in fitting their individual systems into a regional context. An overview of a vision of IITS is presented, along with an example of an integrated system proposed for the Hampton Roads region of Virginia. The vision is based on a critical analysis of five principal design areas: regional architecture, open systems, the World Wide Web and extranets, data warehousing, and data mining.