A new location coding scheme for intelligent transportation systems

Many Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) applications require some form of location information. For example, traveler information services and traffic management are both critically dependent on the specification of location(s). Some ITS applications may need this information in finer resolution than others as demonstrated by the navigation and route guidance systems vs. severe weather warnings for a local area. A location can be a street address, a highway segment, an intersection, a stretch of roadway or a small geographical area. These types of locations can be coded in various ways. In this paper, we first examine several coding schemes reported in the literature and/or used in real applications. Then, we propose a new location coding scheme based on the first three digits of the Zipcode plus local information. This scheme uniquely represents all useful types of locations and is versatile and efficient. Moreover, it fits well the location reference message protocol (LRMP) described in [Goodwin et al., 1995; Goodwin and Xiong, 1994]. To demonstrate its utility and power, we compare the proposed scheme with the Road Name ID scheme [Ramakrishnan et al., 1994].