UALR[1] Intelligent Transportation Systems

Integration Vision

UALR plans to become a regional center for Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) research, providing services to industries, the State of Arkansas and local agencies. It plans to eventually join a national consortium of universities, including George Mason and Ohio State, which conduct research in ITS and remote sensing. Located in central Arkansas, our services are designed to be consistent with the 2025 (and the upcoming 2030) ITS plan of Metroplan, the regional metropolitan planning organization.

Participating Agencies

Aside from University personnel, we plan to work closely with the Arkansas State Highway & Transportation Department (AHTD),

    Metroplan, local governments, and the Arkansas Division of the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA).

Systems Management Components

UALR has identified several focus areas of expertise, where it would like to contribute toward the ITS activities around central Arkansas:

• Transportation planning models and analysis, including land-use forecasting 
• Automatic Vehicle Location and Information Dissemination (Holguin-Verus 2001, Sherali et al. 2002)
• Incident Management (Lee & Hwang 2001)
• Traffic re-routing under natural or man-made hazards (Stathopoulos & Karlaftis 2001).

Facilities

UALR has state-of-the-art facilities built over the years. With the founding of the Donaghey College of Information Science and Systems Engineering (the CyberCollege), these brand new facilities have been added, facilities that directly support ITS research and services:

• GPS[2], Remote sensing & GIS[3] Lab
• Telecommunications and Transportation Lab
• Virtual Reality Center

Budget

The budget will further improve the facilities and support a project team to provide research and services to the central Arkansas region and beyond. Most of the money will be spent to fund:

Deployment Dates

     We plan to conduct the research and deliver the service over a four-year period, starting October 2003.  Milestones are synchronized with the state and regional ITS implementation plan (PB Farradyne et al. 2002, Metroplan 2002).[4]