Ebook: Intelligent transportation systems: new principles and architectures

Rush "hour" turns into several of virtual gridlock. Trains, planes, and buses seem late more often than not. Current transportation systems will clearly not serve the world's need for much longer, but the cost of expanding the existing infrastructure is prohibitively expensive. The challenge is to improve the quality of transportation within the existing infrastructure.To serve the needs of the future, transportation systems must undergo a radical transformation - from the centralized paradigm to the asynchronous, distributed paradigm that integrates fast computers and high-performance networks through novel computer algorithms. Intelligent Transportation Systems takes the first step towards meeting that challenge. Focusing on highway and railway systems, the authors stress the need for computer modeling and simulation to help design and validate complex, large-scale systems and the design of new performance metrics to estimate the performance of these systems. They present the basic principles related to travel related decision making, including coordination, control, and routing. The future highway engineer and traffic specialist must have interdisciplinary training - most importantly in computer science and engineering. Intelligent Transportation Systems help you get that training, putting you on the road to 21st century concepts, methods, and solutions.