California Partners for Advanced Transportation Technology

The ITS Decision website has been developed for the user who is interested in learning about various Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) technologies. Two tools have been developed that will help those users who wish to address a specific problem, obtain information relating to their particular context. These are the Expert System and the Case Based Reasoning tools. The Expert System tool queries the user on the problem context and the problem in general. It then presents information on different types of ITS technologies that may be used to address the problem. The Case-Based Reasoning tool, at present, contains information about three technologies. One of these is a transportation demand management mechanism, specifically the employer based transit pass program. The other two are Automatic Vehicle Location/Computer Aided Dispatch, and Freeway Service Patrol. A user interested in using any of these technologies enters the parameters of his context, i.e. city size, fleet size, as response to queries. The tool then presents him with cases of different locations where the specific technology has been sued. The cases are presented in order of their resemblance with the input parameters. The users could access more information on any of these cases by clicking on the hyperlink. Although not a part of this project, a cost-benefit tool is also added to the website. On using the three tools sequentially, or as per requirement, a user gets a comprehensive view of the benefits or otherwise of using a specific ITS technology.