On architecting and intelligent transport systems

Intelligent transport systems (ITS) are members of an emerging class of systems which have highly distributed architectures and are equally distributed in their development, procurement, and management. Important characteristics of such systems include: (1) the lack of a client with ownership and developmental responsibility for the system, (2) considerable uncertainty in system purposes and a recognition that they will extensively evolve in unknown directions over the lifetime of the system, and (3) the need for extensive voluntary cooperation in their deployment and use. This work uses ITS as an example of how system architecting methods, especially heuristic refinement, can be used to provide developmental guidance and to organize the process of architecture evaluation and selection. In the particular case of ITS, these methods suggest an appropriate abstraction level for the architectural components, and means for combining deployment and architectural concerns.