Intelligent Transportation Systems

ITS Lab @ PSU

Intelligent Transportation Systems Laboratory

A broad range of diverse technologies, known collectively as intelligent transportation systems (ITS), holds the answer to many of our society's transportation problems. ITS are comprised of existing and new technologies, including information processing, sensors, communications, control, and electronics. Combining these technologies in innovative ways and integrating them into our multimodal transportation system will save lives, time, and resources.Transportation is the backbone of our society the movement of people and goods provides the foundation of our quality of life and economic prosperity. Fulfilling the need for a transportation system that is both economically sound and environmentally efficient requires a new way of looking at and solving our transportation problems. The strategy of adding more and more highway capacity neither solves our transportation problems, nor meets the broad national vision of an efficient, integrated transportation system. We focus on the integration and improvement of all modes highway, transit, bicycle, pedestrian and freight.Traffic crashes and congestion take heavy tolls in lives, lost productivity, and wasted energy. ITS enables people and goods to move more safely and efficiently through a state-of-the-art, intermodal transportation system.

 
 

Intelligent Transportation Systems Laboratory's Featured Project:

Techniques for Mining Truck Data to Improve Freight Operations and Planning

It is seen that congestion on the overall highway network is negatively impacting the efficient and effective freight movement, and that this is having a deleterious effect on our national and regional economies. Despite investments in intelligent transportation systems (ITS) in many regions, we still do not have a comprehensive understanding of how our freight transportation system operates. This is complicated by the presence of many private operators with complex needs traveling on publicly operated highways with a complex permitting and regulatory environment. There is a heightened need to improve our knowledge of freight flows in order to improve the overall transportation system, the freight component in particular, and to respond to new and emerging security concerns. The objective of this project is to build upon past and ongoing research in the area of identifying techniques for collecting freight transportation data by designing two specific data collection experiments using an existing ITS infrastructure and equipment. The objective will be met by carefully reviewing the literature, developing unique and comprehensive data sampling strategies, working with regional transportation agency partners to clearly define their data needs, and implementing a data collection experiment to demonstrate the capabilities of two existing ITS surveillance system for freight data col

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