Towards a computational transportation science

In the near future, vehicles, travelers, and the infrastructure will collectively have billions of sensors that can communicate with each other. This environment will enable numerous novel applications and order of magnitude improvements in the performance of existing applications. However, information technology (IT) has not had the dramatic impact on day-to-day transportation that it has had on other domains such as business and science. In terms of the real-time information available to most travelers, with the exception of car navigation systems, the transportation experience has not changed much in the last 30-40 years. During this same time, the miniaturization of computing devices and advances in wireless communication and sensor technology have been propagating computing from the stationary desktop to the mobile outdoors, and making it ubiquitous. Future transportation systems, due to their distributed/mobile nature, can become the ultimate test-bed for this ubiquitous (i.e., embedded, highly-distributed, and sensor-laden) computing environment of unprecedented scale. Information technology is the foundation for implementing new transportation control and management strategies, particularly if they are to be made available in real-time to wireless devices such as cell phones and PDAs, traffic lights or dynamic signs. A related development is the emergence of increasingly more sophisticated geospatial (including spatiotemporal) information management capabilities