Computing and modeling issues in wide-area Advanced Traveler Information Systems

Advanced Traveler Information Systems (ATIS) is a primary component of Intelligent Vehicle Highway Systems (IVHS) under development to improve safety and efficiency of automobile and truck travel. An ATIS is fundamentally a wide-area mobile computing environment involving large numbers of dispersed travelers, many of whom have portable computing capabilities, and who use wireless channels to communicate with databases on remote servers. Successful deployment of such systems requires solutions to several problems in distributed database management, telecommunications, algorithms, and visualization. In addition, there are problems involving integration of these technologies to provide large-scale, end-to-end solutions with acceptable real-time performance. s paper, we describe a number of these problems, and associated needs for analysis, simulation, and modeling. Example problems of importance include allocation of data among stationary servers and mobile computers, distributed queuing strategies under high-demand and limited bandwidth conditions, routing and route guidance algorithms under constraints, and real-time regridding for updating multiple-layer graphical displays.