INTELLIGENT TRANSPORTATION SYSTEMS

The ever-increasing need for mobility has overflooded major cities with vehicles, resulting in growing traffic congestions, accompanied by unpredicted emergencies and accidents. These facts reveal important inefficiencies related to transportation, which call for the development of systems for more efficient and safer mobility. A way to pursue this is to apply the recent findings in the area of communications to the field of transportation management. This can be facilitated by exploiting cognitive networking principles, i.e., by developing transportation management mechanisms with learning capabilities to enable the a priori perception of potential dangers and accordingly amendment of vehicle's behavior. This article proposes functionality that is capable of exploiting the intelligence accumulated through the exchange of information among numerous vehicles that lie in a certain vicinity. This leads to decisions that improve the quality of transportation in terms of reduction of traffic congestions, accident risks, and emergency situations. © 2010 IEEE.