The basic technologies for ITS and their applications: the present and future of traffic and vehicle monitoring

The entire volume "Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS): Past, Present and Future Directions" introduces the reader to the fundamentals of the ITS. It provides an overview of their evolution, starting from the earliest experiments on the route guidance systems in the 70s to their current deployment, and discusses the main challenges to face for their future development. This chapter introduces the basic ITS technologies and related applications. The present and future of traffic and of single vehicle monitoring are described by means of an extensive analysis of the available devices and technologies; fixed and mobile sensors are illustrated, as is the possibility of integrating data obtained from them together with those collected through a diffused crowdsourcing of information. The overview of ITS technologies and their applications is presented from a world-wide and long-lasting perspective, even though many of the examples that have been mentioned within the chapter refer to European best practices; however, these could easily be deployed elsewhere