The term Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) was coined over two decades ago to designate applications of information and communication technologies to the operational management of transportation networks. The main promise of ITS has been very consistent over that period: network capacity can be freed up by optimizing traffic controls and empowering users with accurate travel information. It can be debated how much faith practitioners and policy makers have placed in technology by investing their resources, as well as the extent to which Intelligent Transportation Systems have delivered on their promise. However, there is no question that steady and sometimes spectacular advances in computing technologies and usage trickle down to transportation applications in important ways. As a result, new products and services emerge continuously. Some of them are traditional in that they are marketed to transportation networks operators, while others are developed in tangential markets (e.g. automotive) or even through non-market mechanism (e.g. many mobile web applications). This talk will review major trends in information and communication technologies and demonstrate how each of them is driving innovative transportation services. We will attempt to envision how those trends might develop in the future, so that we can finally examine some of their implications for travel demand and network management. There lie both challenges and opportunities for transportation engineers and planners, but either way, profound changes appear inevitable.
Speaker: J.D. Margulici founded Novavia Solutions, LLC in 2010 as a management consulting firm that aims to create social value by promoting the use and development of Intelligent Transportation Solutions.
J.D. has a dozen years of experience implementing and marketing information technology, with primary applications to roadway traffic management, public transit, airport operations, and air traffic control. He previously spent five years with the California Center for Innovative Transportation (CCIT), at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was the Associate Director. During that time, J.D. and his team successfully managed over thirty Intelligent Transportation Systems projects ranging from late-stage R&D to operational deployment and involving more than a dozen start-up companies. Early in his career, J.D. worked for the French air traffic management agency before becoming the Vice-President of business development at Edatis, a Paris-based software company. Prior to joining CCIT, he was a consultant in airport operations with Jacobs Consulting. J.D. holds a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and physics from the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris, France, as well as a master of science in transportation engineering and an MBA, both from the University of California at Berkeley. He currently serves on the boards of the Intelligent Transportation Society of California and of the North American Traffic Working Group.