Towards a Sustainable Ecosystem of Intelligent Transportation Systems

It is difficult to overstate how large a role Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) technology has played in advancing safety, mobility, and productivity in our daily lives. ITS encompasses a broad range of technologies, including information and communication technologies, transportation and communication infrastructures, connected vehicles, and emerging technologies such as Internet-of-Things (IoT). It has been studied extensively in many different disciplines, including transportation, communication, database and management communities. Unfortunately, there are still many unsolved challenges that hinder the large deployment of advanced ITS systems. Recent studies have proposed using Blockchain, an emerging technology that enables decentralized coordination, to address inherent challenges in ITS such as security and scalability. However, these studies did not address a key question: how can we achieve a sustainable ITS ecosystem? This paper presents our preliminary study where we first point out the limitations of prior Blockchain-based ITS systems and then outline an architecture to support a sustainable ITS ecosystem. Our main goal is to stimulate further effort and cross-disciplinary collaboration by providing guidance and reference for future studies.