ABSTRACT
In our vision, the future will witness remarkable progress in intelligent transportation system (ITS) in two key fronts. First, in the near future, the key ideas underlying the intelligent transportation of matter will extend beyond vehicular traffic and trains to other modes of transportation including cargo air transport, passenger air transport, marine ferries, and personalized rapid transit (PRT) system. The distant future may even witness its extension into interplanetary travel. The need for intelligent transportation will be felt most acutely under three scenarios-increased travel speeds, significant increase in the number of travelers, and increased demand for precise and timely information by travelers, all of which are highly likely in the future. From the scientific and engineering perspective, the advances in intelligent transportation will occur in the theoretical and technological innovations. From the ordinary traveler’s point of view, however, the real advance and the direct benefit will occur in the seamless and natural integration of the different modes of transportation. As a result of the integration, the traveler will (1) gain access to fairly accurate status information of any transportationmode, anywhere in the world, from any point in the system, and (2) be permitted to effect reservations, dynamically, even while en route, on any transportation mode in the world. Precision and timeliness of information are crucial to developing faith and trust in the system among the travelers, which may be delivered, in general, by distributed systems. Utilizing intelligent personalized decision aids, the traveler may process the available information to compute the most efficient route or reroute across all different transportation modes, including air, railways, automobiles, ferries, and so on. The most frequent causes for replanning include changes in the traveler’s intention and needs and unscheduled delays in a currently reserved transportation system.
