A smart drive to future transport systems

Road transport vehicles (RTV) technologies, features and capacities are rapidly evolving, hence fostering innovative transport paradigms strongly impacting on all involved transport players. Current and unforeseen technological advances are pushing for creating a novel environment where road transport users can be empowered with tools enabling higher flexibility, bringing new opportunities, opening social ecosystem participation and finally endowing the ability to determine which options are more feasible while traveling. However, the development of such environment is not so easy to deploy. Indeed, Intelligent Transport System (ITS) infrastructures should be improved to support the integration of heterogeneous technologies as well as to promote the development of ITS standards and smart transport vehicles utilization. This paper conceptually introduces the characteristics of an innovative hierarchical cloud-based architecture for an in-vehicular platform that integrates heterogeneous technologies, providing the necessary features to manage the connectivity, data, applications and services for RTV, thus providing them with analytic and smart “social”-oriented capabilities.