The term Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) was coined over two decades ago to designate applications of information and communication technologies to the operational management of transportation networks. The main promise of ITS has been very consistent over that period: network capacity can be freed up by optimizing traffic controls and empowering users with accurate travel information. It can be debated how much faith practitioners and policy makers have placed in technology by investing their resources, as well as the extent to which Intelligent Transportation Systems have delivered on their promise. However, there is no question that steady and sometimes spectacular advances in computing technologies and usage trickle down to transportation applications in important ways. As a result, new products and services emerge continuously. They include systems that address the direct needs of networks managers, as well as others that are developed in tangential markets (e.g. automotive) or even through non-market mechanisms (e.g. many mobile web applications). This talk presentation reviews major trends in information and communication technologies and demonstrate how each of them is driving innovative transportation services. We attempt to envision how those trends might develop in the future, so that we can finally examine some of their implications for travel demand and network management. There lie both challenges and opportunities for transportation engineers and planners, but either way, profound changes appear inevitable.

1. Intelligent Transportation J.D. Margulici
Trends and Perspectives jdm@novavia.us
2011 www.novaviasolutions.com
Chapter 8: Information Technology Trends
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2.  ITS primer and brief history
Intelligent Transportation
 State of the art
Trends and Perspectives
2011
 Information technology trends
 Prospective and implications
J.D. Margulici
jdm@novavia.us
www.novaviasolutions.com

3. Overview
Core computing
Location
Wireless networking
Social web
Crowd sourcing
Big data
Web technologies
Open data
Applications development
User interactions
ITS Trends and Perspectives - April 2011 3

4. Core computing
Moore’s law continues to deliver performance/costs improvements despite single-core limitations
Consumer electronics drive availability and lower costs for micro-sensors & digital devices
Systems on chips provide low-power, high-speed embedded capabilities
Dramatic gains in machine vision, speech technology
ITS Trends and Perspectives - April 2011 4

5. Location
GPS augmentation systems provide high-accuracy positioning
GPS positioning now certified for aircraft navigation and landing
Cellular networks complement GPS for positioning
Europe, China deploying their own GNSS designed for critical civilian applications
Solutions are now available for indoor / urban canyon positioning, vertical market applications
ITS Trends and Perspectives - April 2011 5

6. Wireless networking
4G LTE / WiMax networks now broadly available, 5 Mbps a reality
Public safety, DSRC spectrum underutilized, could benefit from cellular standards
Data-oriented transmission, virtualization can overcome cost and interoperability issues
Business models are still evolving – ongoing tension between content and channels
ITS Trends and Perspectives - April 2011 6

7. Social web
Social networks are transforming the traveler information landscape
Peer 2 Peer resource sharing models are spearheading new travel behaviors
Social networks offer new forms of citizen engagement in transportation planning
Web 2.0 interactions paradigm is starting to penetrate the enterprise software market
ITS Trends and Perspectives - April 2011 7

8. Crowdsourcing
Traveler information systems powered by system users, traffic probes
Cities are collecting residents’ needs through web-based applications
Agencies can tap wisdom of the crowd for some of their decision-making
ITS Trends and Perspectives - April 2011 8

9. Big data
Internet businesses have developed new tools for big, structured / unstructured data
Data mining of terabytes and petabytes are becoming common place
Mashups are complementing Extract-Transform-Load for business intelligence
ITS Trends and Perspectives - April 2011 9

10. Web technologies
Web services have become the norm for exchanging data and application controls
Storage, computation and applications all moving to cloud-based architectures
Ajax, Flash, HTML 5 are enabling rich browser-based applications
Software as a Service has not grown as fast as once predicted but could pick up
ITS Trends and Perspectives - April 2011 10

11. Open data
Google’s GTFS has set a transit revolution in motion
Gives agencies a free ride on the application layer, but new governance problems are emerging
Greater transparency is accelerating a shift to performance management
ITS Trends and Perspectives - April 2011 11

12. Applications development
Hundreds of thousands of iPhone / iPad, Android apps
Open source not only challenges traditional software sales, communities build great products
Free languages, IDEs, libraries, tools facilitate bottom-up development (think Google maps!)
ITS Trends and Perspectives - April 2011 12

13. User interactions
Touch / multi-touch / tablets offer new human-machine interaction possibilities
Speech recognition and voice commands actually work!
3D is coming to your living room –and to your Transportation Management Center next?
ITS Trends and Perspectives - April 2011 13

14. Intelligent Transportation J.D. Margulici
Trends and Perspectives jdm@novavia.us
2011 www.novaviasolutions.com
Next is
Chapter 9: Prospective and Implications