INTELLIGENT TRANSPORTATIOB SYSTEMS: AN HISTORICAL ASSESSMENT AND THE ROLE OF OPERATIONS RESEARCH

The purpose of this paper is to make a partial assessment of the achievements of intelligent transportation systems (ITS) in a number of key domains. Section 1 is dedicated to a brief overview of ITS history and main components, while section 2 presents some of the major effortc aimed at the development of national ITS architectures. The paper compares and highlights the similarities and differences between the ISO, American, Canadian, European, and Japanese system architectures. The paper focuses on two major aspects of ITS: advanced traveler information systems in section 3 and commercial vehicle operations and advanced fleet management systems in section 4. In each case, the paper reviews main issues and development stages, identifies technological challenges and achievements, and through descriptions of possible applications of operations research, illustrates how the introduction of better decision support software based on operations research methods and models could very significantly improve the ultimate performance of ITS.