A distributed framework for intelligent transportation systems

Integrating individual intelligent transportation systems into comprehensive platforms is a key challenge faced by transport authorities in the provision of optimal service s to users. The use of an ITS architecture encourages structured development and integration of ITS systems that leads to maximization of benefits by minimizing redundancies and maximizing capabilities. This paper presents a distributed framework for a multi-layered ITS architecture that has been designed for integrating information generated and used by future as well as existing intelligent transportation systems and applications. The iTransIT framework provides a data model that allow complex ITS domains to be successfully decomposed into a number of data layers. This multi-layered data model may be distributed across multiple systems and exploits the overlapping temporal and spatial aspects of traffic information to allow the federation of data from diverse ITS systems. Moreover, the abstractions used to compose the data model combined with the range of interaction paradigms supported by the iTransIT architecture allow interoperation between systems based on different communication technologies. This provides the framework with the flexibility to enable a gradual integration of systems over time thereby reducing integration restrictions on previously deployed systems while catering for the as yet unknown requirements of future and novel systems .