ITSGrid: A Novel Integrated Intelligent Transportation Information and Service Platform

Summary form only given. With increasing demands of effective and efficient transportation from our society, the transportation issue has become a noticeable obstacle to the economic development for all countries and regions to a great extend. ITS (intelligent transportation systems) technology is brought forward and considered as an effective approach that promises to alleviate many transportation problems such as traffic congestion, high accident rate, air pollution, and improve safety and reliability on existing roadway system. However, ITS architectures do not give proper answers to some important problems in ITS such as how to integrate heterogeneous data on the semantic level, how to manage dynamic business process, how to cooperate ITS subsystems among different domains, how to communicate among traffic control center and road sensor network, etc. Hence, a fundamental shift in approach is needed to effectively resolve these complex problems. Fortunately, grid technology, semantic Web technology, Web service technology, messaging oriented middleware (MOM) technology bring us great chance to build a integrated platform for ITS to solve the before-mentioned issues. Grid computing is an ideal technology to realize resource sharing in distributed heterogeneity environments. Semantic Web offers a great opportunity to support data semantization based on a domain-specific ontology database. Process coordination based on Web service gives a unified way to cooperate ITS subsystems among different organizations. Messaging oriented middleware enables distributed communication that is loosely coupled, reliable, and asynchronous in complex network environment. In this paper, we explore four technologies to build a novel integrated intelligent transportation information and service platform to realize traffic data semantization, traffic resource sharing, cooperation traffic process management, and traffic sensor network communication. As a result, a key project for ITISP, ITSGrid, was started up by Zhejiang University and Hangzhou Enjoyor Electronics Co. Ltd in 2005. ITSGrid is an undergoing joint engineering project designed and developed by CCNT Lab in Zhejiang University and Enjoyor Electronics. The new features of ITSGrid are originated from two important research projects artGrid and DartFlow, and one key engineering project - JTang Application Server, in CCNT Lab. Its goal is to build intelligent transportation information and service platform, to integrate traffic data resources collected by Enjoyor and cooperate existing ITS subsystems and services deployed by Enjoyor, finally serve for transportation construction in China