Editorial: Trends in transportation

In an Editorial in the June 1975 issue of this TRANSACTIONS, Editor Stephen Kahne suggested that brief statements regarding trends in particular areas of interest to our community be made by appropriate Associate Editors. The current author´s response to that suggestion was enthusiastic enough to get the assignment to produce the first element of a series that we hope to be an important contribution to the efforts of the Information Dissemination Committee to improve communications with TRANSACTIONS readers. It is argued that there are many opportunities for the application of automatic control techniques, both for the improved performance of individual vehicles and for the efficient management of multiple vehicle systems. In both cases, the potential payoff is enormous. After explaining the impact of such improvements, the remainder of this discussion is concerned with the opportunities and challenges associated with the management of multiple vehicle systems, for it is in this area that further advances in the development of automatic control theory will be required to maximize the benefits associated with the automation of these systems.