Towards a computational transportation science

In the near future, vehicles, travelers, and the transportation infrastructure will collectively have millions of sensors that can communicate with each other. This environment will enable numerous new applications and dramatic improvements in the performance of existing applications. Due to their distributed and mobile nature, future transportation systems may become the ultimate testbed for a ubiquitous (i.e., embedded, highly-distributed) and sensor-laden computing environment of unprecedented scale. This field is currently subsumed by intelligent transportation systems, or ITS. However, the question arises whether behind intelligent transportation systems we also need a science (for a similar discussion see [2]). The paradigm shifts witnessed in technical possibilities— for example, from centralized to distributed or decentralized computing, from carefully managed authoritative data to massive real-time data streams of unknown quality—may require new scientific foundations. More and more aspects of transportation science require sophisticated computational methods to deal with the complexity of dynamic environments. We argue that a better interface between transportation science and computer and information science is needed. The communication and exchange between these scientific communities would improve, but there are also shared common themes and long-term research questions. Around these core research themes we define a new discipline: computational transportation science. Computational transportation science (CTS) concerns the study of transportation systems where people interact with information systems (e.g., interfaces for driver assistance, or integrated transport information); where systems monitor and interpret traffic (e.g., mining for activity patterns, or crowd-sourcing to monitor events); or where systems manage the traffic (e.g., control of trafficflow at traffic lights, or toll management). CTS inherits from computer science the aspects of distributed and decentralized computing and spatiotemporal information processing, and from transportation science the aspects of transportation