Transcript
BO OK R E V I E W
Review of the Book “Intelligent Transportation Systems: Smart and Green Infrastructure Design”
T
his book illustrates the activities and knowledge of the authors over the last 10 years in the field of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). It is a critical revision of a best-seller entitled “Intelligent Transportation Systems: New principles and architectures” [1] that was published in 2000. The new book observes analytically the pros and cons of ITS in the last decade, adding two more chapters (the first two in this book) and revising/updating the others accordingly. As the new title highlights, extra emphasis is now given to not only the advantages of smart, but of green infrastructure designs as well. Indicatively, the authors write in the introduction: “We also observe that the efficiency attribute of ITS is analogous to the ubiquitous “green” color of life on earth in that both ITS and life aim to utilize the least amount of energy and achieve the greatest degree of order, the antithesis of which is entropy or disorder.” But what green (or sustainable) design really is? Sustainable (or green) design is a general term that describes environmentally conscious design techniques in the field of engineering. In 1987, the report entitled “Our Common Future” Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MITS.2011.940476 Date of publication: 6 April 2011
Title: Intelligent Transportation Systems: Smart and Green Infrastructure Design Authors: Sumit Ghosh, Tony S. Lee ISBN/Press/Year: 978-1-4398-3518-0/ CRC Press/ 2010 Price: US$119.95 WWW link: http://www.crcpress.com/ product/isbn/9781439835180;jsessionid= 1JWZU7o86FzpHL9ype5fsw**
from the United Nations World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED), gave a proper definition for sustainable development: “Sustainable development meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs,” [2]. Chapter 1 critically reviews the state of the art of ITS in USA and presents four key challenges that ITS confront. These challenges, as the authors discuss, revolve around proper use, inspiring ideas, research and continuous education. They underline that ITS engineers should receive interdisciplinary training in civil engineering, electrical engineering, transportation engineering and planning, as well as human factors management. In addition, they argue strongly on the need to incorporate innovative and creative approaches to transporta-
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tion problems, based on the fundamental principles and scientific validation. The first part of chapter 2 presents the metalevel principles and insights, which are based on the assumption that due to the advances of computer science, we can imagine the kind of challenges that we are likely to face in the future and proactively find the appropriate solutions. Following this, the second part of chapter 2 explains how the insight and metaprinciples may be applied to real-world ITS problems. Chapter 2 ends posing a number of formidable challenges for ITS, which, if and when solved utilizing metalevel and ITS principles, will imply a quantum leap in technology and substantial benefits in society.
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OCTOBER IEEE CONFERENCE ON INTELLIGENT TRANSPORTATION SYSTEMS (ITSC2011)
October 5–7, 2011 Washington, DC, USA Submission deadline: passed http://www.seas.gwu.edu/itsc2011
BOOK REVIEW
IEEE INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON SYSTEMS, MAN, AND CYBERNETICS (SMC2011)
WORLD CONGRESS ON INTELLIGENT TRANSPORT SYSTEMS
October 18–20, 2011 Orlando, Florida, USA Submission deadline: passed http://www.itsworldcongress.org
October 9–12, 2011 Anchorage, AK, USA Submission deadline: passed http://www.smc2011.org/
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Reviewer: Christos-Nikolaos Anagnostopoulos Christos-Nikolaos E. Anagnostopoulos was born in Athens, Greece in 1975. He received his Mechanical Engineering Diploma from the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) in 1998, and the Ph.D. degree from the Electrical and Computer Engineering Dpt., NTUA in 2002. From 2008, he serves the University of the Aegean as assistant professor in the Cultural Technology and Communication Department. He is a member of the Greek chamber of Engineers and a member of IEEE. His research interests include image processing, computer vision, neural networks, and artificial intelligence. He has published more than 100 papers in journals and conferences, in the above subjects as well as other related fields in informatics. He also serves as associate editor for the IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Magazine.
Chapter 3 examines the essential nature of all transportation systems, especially from the perspective of future needs, and presents the fundamental principles that emerge from the analysis. Chapter 3 presents key design issues of future systems including control algorithms, the nature of the interactions between the different system entities and the network that interconnects the entities. This chapter also underscores the role of modeling and simulation in the design of future systems. The next two chapters (4 and 5) present case studies in railway networks based on the ideas presented in chapter 3. Specifically, chapter 4 studies a distributed approach to train routing in a railway network and presents a critical review of the related literature. It ends with presentation of DARYN [3], a distributed control algorithm. Chapter 5 presents RYNSORD, a sophisticated algorithm for congestion mitigation in railways. RYNSORD [4] studies the problem for a given rail-
way network of N moving trains and S stations, where every train utilizes “look ahead,” thus reserving N tracks ahead of their current position. The goal is to improve the utilization of the resources, tracks and also to mitigate congestion. Chapter 6 introduces the reader to DICAF [5], an algorithm that employs the same principles, namely that of asynchronous and distributed nature, as the ones in chapter 4 and 5. DICAF recognizes crucial problems of Intelligent Vehicle Highway Systems (IVHS) and proposes the use of a distributed architecture wherein the overall task of data collection, processing, dissemination of information and decision making is distributed among all of the components of an IVHS. Chapter 7 presents a systematic and detailed study of the stability of RYNSORD in the presence of perturbations, formal definitions and analysis. This analysis is key to understanding the robustness and resilience of the complex transportation systems. Chapter 8
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introduces techniques that have been developed for the modeling and simulation of ITS architectures, along with their underlying software techniques and comparative results. The book ends with two very short chapters related to future issues in ITS and the description of the RYNSORD simulator, which is available in the accompanying CD-ROM. This book is the second edition of a book published in 2000, but undoubtedly, the first three chapters of the book are about novelties in ITS. I was delighted to see application-specific topics discussed in relation to railway networks and highway systems, and made accessible to traffic engineers and advanced students who seek to broaden their knowledge in similar applications. Nowadays, it is evident that the commitment to going green and aiming at sustainability is no longer just an option but rather a necessity. In this regard, the book can serve as a good reference.
References [1] S. Ghosh and T. S. Lee, Intelligent Transportation Systems: New Principles and Architectures. CRC Press, 2000. [2] World Commission on Environment and Development, “Our common future,” 1987. Published as Annex to General Assembly Document A/42/427, Development and International Cooperation: Environment, Aug. 2, 1987. [3] R. V. Iyer and S. Ghosh, “DARYN—A distributed decision-making algorithm for railway networks: Modeling and simulation,” IEEE Trans. Veh. Technol., vol. 44, no. 1, pp. 180–191, 1995. [4] T. S. Lee and S. Ghosh, “RYNSORD: A novel decentralized algorithm for railway Networks with soft reservation,” IEEE Trans. Veh. Technol., vol. 47, no. 4, pp. 1350–1364, 1998. [5] N. Utamaphethai and S. Ghosh, “DICAF: A distributed architecture for intelligent transportation,” Computer, vol. 31, no. 3, pp. 78–84, 1998.
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