Conception and design of intelligent traveler information systems

Research on Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) aims to provide advanced transportation with less cost, more convenience and more personalization. The emergence of ITS has fostered the development of advanced traveler information systems (ATIS). These systems are designed to assist travelers in making pre-trip and en route travel choice decisions. It is contended that while many traveler information systems are innovative and make use of cutting edge technologies, they lack real machine intelligence and therefore may be limited in their ability to service the traveling public over the long run. The purpose of this paper is to present a vision of the next generation traveler information system, termed Intelligent Traveler Information Systems (ITIS) in which multi-agent systems (MAS) techniques are drawn upon to create systems capable of providing travelers with more personalized planning assistance. Customer service orientation is considered essential in business in today's marketplace, and ITIS are customer-oriented and smart enough to be customer specific. Then its key component, driver agent, was modeled based on the Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) agent architecture.