A Cyber–Physical–Social Platform for Intelligent Transportation Systems

The field of ITS [1] capitalizes on emerging information and communication technologies (ICT) to better manage today’s increasingly congested and dynamic transportation networks. ITS involve the application of ICT to improve the performance of transportation systems and to increase the contribution of these systems to economic and social well-being. Typical ITS applications [2] involve a wide variety of interconnected research problems, the nature of which can be (1) technical (sensing, communication, automated vehicle technology, etc.); (2) methodological (control systems theory, operations research, traffic flow theory, artificial intelligence, simulation methods, image processing, etc.); and (3) behavioral (driver-vehicle interactions, user decision making, travel demand management, etc.). These three aspects can also be referred to as physical, cyber, and social, respectively. Thus, transportation-related research is inherently multi-and interdisciplinary in nature. A contemporary challenge to the ITS community is to integrate human knowledge and expertise with technical resources. ITS stakeholders are known to be working in isolated silos.