Information Technology as a Critical Element of the Transportation Infrastructure

Advanced infrastructure systems (AISs) are sensor data–driven control and management systems, which have been developed to improve the performance of society's infrastructure systems. AISs are becoming commonplace in the transportation infrastructure, for example, in traffic operations, structural monitoring, environmental modeling, and especially in the emerging initiative known as vehicle infrastructure integration. Thus, information technology (IT) is fundamentally changing the composition of what is referred to as the transportation infrastructure. Finding sophisticated IT systems serving critical control and management functions in the infrastructure itself also is becoming commonplace. However, in general, the organizational structures of transportation agencies have been established to support IT as a tool to provide administrative and analytic support. To move forward and allow departments of transportation to take full advantage of AISs, it is recommended that agencies establish agencywide groups on IT in infrastructure, create interoperability standards, and better prepare transportation engineers to apply IT.