175The Future of Intelligent Transport Systems. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-818281-9.00016-4
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Chapter 16
Transportation network
applications
16.1 Introduction
Transportation networks comprise any type of vehicle such as (1) cars, buses,
and bicycles that move on roads and highways, (2) trains that employ the stable
trajectory railway networks, and (3) vessels and planes that move through sea
and air following loosely-defined trajectories. Although most research has been
performed in road and railway networks (also known as planar networks) that
offer a predefined track infrastructure, the other means of transportation have
recently gained the researchers’ interest. Airline networks and maritime trans-
portation networks have been in the focus of intelligent transportation system
developers since they have an always increasing business interest and they have
been equipped with sensor and processing infrastructures that increased the
amount of data available on a global scale. The Automatic Identification System
(AIS) that allows tracking of planes and vessels, the rich information collected
in ports and airports concerning passengers (passenger numbers, waiting times,
etc. per airport or company), cargo and baggage handling information, and fleet
monitoring and management data (e.g., plane delays or landing and take-off
times per airport) are few of the data that can be used by the applications that
aim in optimizing a transportation network performance.
The main aim of a planar transportation network applications is to smoothly
integrate information from the vehicles that operate in the network and con-
ditional data from external sources and develop smarter solutions both for the
drivers and the network operators and designers. Among the various solutions
that have been developed so far, we distinguish intelligent traffic management,
collision avoidance, detection of outlying situations that need an immediate
response, and in other prediction and prevention solutions that lead to more
efficient transportation networks. Nowadays, railway transportation networks
are mostly examined as parts of multimodal transportation networks for cargos
and passengers. Recent research also focuses on urban railway transportation
systems and proposes solutions that are mostly of interest to the passengers
(robustness, flexibility, delay absorption, etc.) (Parbo et al., 2016).
In the case of maritime transportation networks, the two main objectives
are the robustness, safety, and efficiency of the network (Peng et al., 2017,