Introduction to the Minitrack - Intelligent Systems in Traffic and Transportation

Traffic, transportation and logistics are important components of human life. Moreover, they are absolutely necessary for most social and economic activities. Traffic and transportation are both complex areas involving several decision levels, decision makers and customers. Both fields are also characterized by different uncertainties and considerable capital expenditures. To remain competitive, countries and in particular industries must deal with a large amount of data, sophisticated models, optimization techniques as well as powerful computer and information technology. Today's software systems in traffic and transportation are often isolated ITtools that cannot solve complex large scale problems. The main reasons are that those tools fail to address important constraints, cannot deal with conflicting objectives, do not react to dynamics, and, cannot interact with the user in a timely and meaningful way. However, recent scientific and technological advances in the fields of Distributed Artificial Intelligence, Computational Intelligence, Optimization-Metaheuristics, Geographical Information Systems, Simulation and others allow to build Intelligent Systems, which are able to support decision analysis and problem solving in the field of Traffic and Transportation Systems. Examples of those Intelligent Systems have been elaborated and published during the last years. The HICSS-33 Minitrack "Intelligent Systems in Traffic and Transportation" addresses the Modeling and the Implementation Aspects of Intelligent Systems to solve