Talk Title: Intelligent Transportation Systems
Abstract: Effectivemeans of transportation are fundamental requirement for suitable growth oftoday’s world. Education, health, energy, commerce, in short, every sector, oneway or another is connected to the transportation. All modes of transportationare important for modern society, however, the road transportation in urbanareas is extremely significant as a huge mass directly engage and get affected byit daily. Effective management of the road transportation is the need of hour,as failing to do so may have extremely adverse effects on quality of life, economy,and life expectancy. As per World Health Organization (WHO), worldwide, about1.25 million people die in road accidents per year. If the trend prevails thenthese traffic accidents will be 7th leading cause of death by 2030in the world. In last twelve years the data collected by the Rescue 1122emergency service of Punjab, Pakistan, shows that around 1.28 million accidentsoccurred in 36 major districts of Punjab province. Besides human loss, roadaccidents also cause an enormous financial bearing, which is on average up tofive percent of national Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in a developing country.Being a developing country, Pakistan needs an immediate initiative to cut suchhuge financial bearing and to meet global and locally required targets whichare set in the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals 2030. ArtificialIntelligence may play a vital role in addressing challenges of the roadtransportation. Road transportation could be broadly categorized in two classesnamely traffic and infrastructure. On traffic side there are major four areaswhere AI applications are being developed namely autonomous vehicles, vehiclemaintenance, advance driver support systems (ADAS) and modeling of drivers. Oninfrastructure end, there are two major areas where AI applications are beingmade namely engineering and management of the road infrastructure. The engineeringapplications focus on autonomous design and optimization of road networkwhereas management applications focus on autonomous traffic flow control, lawenforcement and policy design using social simulation. All these applicationsare highly inter-related and complement each other which are collectivelycalled as the “intelligent transportation systems (ITS)”. This talk will coverstate-of-the-art of ITS, its local initiatives and opportunities.
