Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Computational Transportation Science

IWCTS 2009, held in conjunction with the seventeenth international conference on the advances in geographic information systems (ACM SIGSPATIAL GIS 2009), was the second international workshop on Computational Transportation Science. The aim of the workshop was to bring together the researchers from the areas of computer science and transportation science to explore areas of synergy and lay a foundation for research and development in the emerging discipline of Computational Transportation Science (CTS). CTS is a discipline that combines computer science with modeling, planning, and economic aspects of transportation. It aims to go beyond navigation methods and plans to address data management issues and data mining in the area of transportation science thereby improving efficiency, equity, mobility, accessibility, and safety of current transportation systems. In the recent years, we have seen enormous progress in the areas of vehicular technology, handheld devices, and communication infrastructure that often involves millions sensors that can communicate with each other. These advances definitely offer enormous potential to improve the performance of current transportation applications. Miniature computing devices and advances in wireless communication and sensor technology have definitely moved computing from stationary desktops to mobile devices making computation in transportation more ubiquitous, opening up enormous opportunities for information technology. However, the impact of information technology on these applications does not match the dramatic effect it has had, on other domains in business and science. In addition to implementing new computing strategies specially suitable for popular wireless devices such as cell phones and PDAs, computer science can also bring sophisticated geospatial and spatio-temporal information management capabilities to the area of transportation science.