Introduction to Intelligent Systems in Traffic and Transportation

Urban mobility is not only one of the pillars of modern economic systems, but also a key issue in the quest for equality of opportunity, once it can improve access to other services. Currently however, there is a number of negative issues related to traffic, especially in megacities, such as economical issues (cost of opportunity caused by delays), environmental (externalities related to emissions of pollutants), and social (traffic accidents). Solutions to these issues are more and more closely tied to information and communication technology. Indeed, a search in the technical literature (using the keyword "urban traffic" to filter out articles on data network traffic) retrieved the following number of articles (as of December 3rd, 2013): 9,443 (ACM Digital Library), 26,054 (Scopus), and 1,730,000 (Google Scholar). Moreover, articles listed in the ACM query relate to conferences as diverse as MobiCom, CHI, PADS, and AAMAS. This means that there is a big and diverse community of computer scientists and computer engineers who venture on research that is connected to the development of intelligent traffic and transportation systems. It is also possible to see that this community is growing, and that research projects are getting more and more interdisciplinary. To foster the cooperation among the involved communities, the present book aims at giving a broad introduction into the basic but relevant concepts related to transportation systems, targeting researchers and practitioners from computer science and information technology. On the other hand, the second part of this book gives a panorama about some of the newest and exciting new technologies that originate in computer science and computer engineering, which are now being employed in projects related to car to car communication, interconnected vehicles, car navigation, platooning, crowd sensing and sensor networks, among others. This second part may well be interesting to traffic engineers and researchers from this community.