A framework for integrating existing and novel intelligent transportation systems

Efficient use and re-use of traffic data depends on an ITS architecture that enables information sharing across a wide variety of intelligent transportation systems and applications. Existing ITS architectures, such as KAREN or the national ITS architecture, can be used to develop systems within a given framework thereby facilitating such inter-system integration. However, these architectures typically include assumptions regarding the overall organization of system functionality that prohibit integration of previously deployed systems without major reengineering. This paper presents a framework for an ITS architecture that has been designed for integrating novel as well as existing intelligent transportation systems and applications. The iTransIT framework supports a number of possible systems interaction paradigms and proposes a layered data model to facilitate data exchange between systems with diverse service requirements and functional organizations. These data layers are defined within a common context model, may be distributed across multiple systems, and exploit the overlapping temporal and spatial aspects of information generated and used by both legacy and future systems.